


downpour

by owlinaminor



Series: author's favorites [4]
Category: Sense8 (TV)
Genre: Asexual Character, Canon Compliant, Developing Relationship, F/M, Post-Finale, Relationship Study
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-27
Updated: 2018-06-10
Packaged: 2018-11-19 21:30:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 31,626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11322123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/owlinaminor/pseuds/owlinaminor
Summary: It is never just rain, with them.  It is never just a drizzle, or a mist, or a sprinkling of the flowers.It is always a downpour.(a kala/wolfgang relationship study in three parts.)(UPDATE, 6/10/18:added a post-finale coda.)





	1. part i

**Author's Note:**

> almost a month ago, i asked myself, _what the fuck is going on with kala and wolfgang?_ this project is my attempt to answer that question, for myself and anyone else who is curious enough to read it. it's a fic, but it's also kind-of an overly lyrical literary analysis, and also kind-of a very extensive water metaphor. i hope you enjoy.
> 
> thanks is due to [amber](https://twitter.com/ambyguity_) for her wonderful beta-ing, to [megan](https://twitter.com/ohirareon) and [nat](https://twitter.com/natroze) for letting me shout at them about my ideas, and to [becky](https://twitter.com/dickaeopolis) for absolutely nothing. she did not help this fic in any way. she is only in this a/n because it felt too weird to write one without mentioning her.

**_i. energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transferred or transformed._ **

 

It is raining in Berlin.

She hears the lightning, the thunder, pounding on the pavement like a heart about to break – she feels in her bones that if she does not find an umbrella or a shield, she will arrive at work a new woman.

It is not raining in Bombay, her father tells her, kind smile on his face as he tugs her back to earth.  But it is still raining – crashing – flooding.  As she steps out of the restaurant and into the world, she feels a hint of a name – the name of the city where it is raining, or perhaps the name of the rain itself.  She turns her head, she steps out with a confident smile, and the name slips away like puddles sinking into a drain.

She steps out into a hurricane, without a shield or an umbrella to guide her.

 

Indian food.

He can’t remember the last time he wanted Indian food, but right now, these are the only tastes he can imagine wanting – spicy and sweet and savory, so much more colorful than his usual potatoes and sausage.  The girl (fuck him, he’s forgotten her name already) goes along with it because she thinks his offer to pay means something that it doesn’t.  He drowns out her idle chatter and focuses on the taste of kolhapuri, dark meat and onions and chili pepper that should have him reaching for his beer every other bite but instead is strangely familiar, comforting, like the half-remembered shape of his mother’s smile.

Wolfgang focuses on the food, and on the chill of the breeze, and on the lights of the colored lamps, reflected in the window, until he is pulled abruptly back to Berlin by the girl’s quietly phrased question.

_What are you looking for?_

What _is_ he looking for?

He glances up, he tries to formulate an answer – and he sees her.  A woman dressed all in shimmering starlight, long hair glistening in the fluorescent light, staring into the distance as though she is a soldier striding into battle.  Wolfgang feels the world fade around him – sees colors drain to black and white in his peripheral vision – or perhaps the world only seems to fade now because _she_ has entered it – because all colors are suddenly black and white compared to the aquamarine of her dress, the ochre of her skin, the mahogany of her eyes.  Perhaps he has stepped into a parallel universe, or she has stepped out of one, because Wolfgang does not deserve to walk the same floors as such a woman.  Wolfgang does not deserve –

His eyes meet hers.

And all thoughts of _deserving_ and _explanations_ and even _colors_ fly out of his mind, replaced by a sensation of clarity as cold as diving into the deep end of a pool.  He has never seen this woman before in his life, and yet in this moment he _knows_ her – he knows the warmth of the breeze on her skin and the heaviness of the bracelets on her arms.  He knows the feeling of infinite loneliness bearing down upon her back like a satchel of rocks.

And he knows that, if, in this moment, him diving off her balcony into the river below would lift the burden of her loneliness – he would jump without a second thought.

_What are you looking for?_

If Wolfgang still believed in gods, he would say that a god has just given him his answer.

 

Someone is having sex.

Kala wakes up to this wildly inappropriate vision, sometime past four in the morning – to the bed creaking, the woman shouting, the heavy breathing, as though these two strangers are running a marathon instead of shoving into each other.  She would think that this is some perverted dream, if not for the absolute terror she feels, combined with absolute curiosity.  She wants to look – but she is a terrible person for looking – but she _wants to look._

She looks.

This is nothing like the porn she’s seen.  It’s grittier, it’s more uncomfortable, it makes Kala worried that the woman perched on top could slip off the bed and crack her head open at any moment.  And Kala knows – she works in pharmaceuticals, she _knows_ – the chances that one of them has an STD, that this night will lead to untold expense, that one or both of them will live to regret it.  This is nothing like what Kala imagined sex to be, and yet it is infinitely more thrilling.

_Oh, I fucking love you, Shugsie.  I fucking love you._

How does she know, Kala wonders.  How does she know that she loves him?  Does she feel it rising in her heart like a helium balloon fit to burst?  Or is she only saying that in order to get him to push harder?

These questions circle in her mind until sleep is an impossibility.  She slips out of bed, tiptoes past her family’s bedrooms, and heads for the roof.  The roof is cool and smooth beneath her bare feet, and the city is quiet around her – only a few lights flickering in the windows of apartment buildings, where she imagines writers staying up late to finish stories that would not let them rest, students cramming for impossible tests in the morning, young couples rocking their newborns to sleep.  And a few lights – she wonders how many – must be people engaged in acts like the one she just witnessed.

Someday, she’s going to need to do _that_ – or something like that – with Rajan.  Kala feels a chill run down her spine at the thought.  But she dismisses it easily enough, with the reminder that she will cross that bridge when she comes to it.

She does not love Rajan.  She knows love, and what she feels for that man – that smart, handsome, perfect prince charming of a man – is not the all-encompassing bonfire she calls love.  But sitting here on the rooftop, looking out at her city, she feels something like love – less a bonfire and more a million soft candles – for each and every person contained within it.  Surely a little bit of that love, one of those candles, is burning for Rajan?

Surely it is.  Whether or not is enough to make their marriage happy, is another question.  And yet, Kala has seen enough successful arranged marriages to know that she can work towards love – she can light a candle and nurture it every day, place her hands around the flame when winds swoop in, blow softly on its embers when it threatens to die out.  She can make her future happy.

She is in the midst of convincing herself that this work will be worth it when she hears a song.

It is not a song she has ever heard before, and yet it is impossibly familiar, comfortable as the taste of her father’s kolhapuri.  It is a song about joy, and prayer, and revolution – about believing the best in every single person you meet.  The words come to Kala, as naturally as the urge to spread her hands and dance in the rain.

She sings along to this song in her head.  She sings for her city, and for her family, and for the love she feels growing inside her – one million little candles, growing stronger every moment.  And as she sways back and forth with the slow beat, she is not quite on her rooftop in Bombay any more – and she is on her rooftop in Bombay still – and she is feeling the warmth of a summer breeze and the chill of air conditioning up too high, she is smelling the scent of her father starting up breakfast several floors below and the scent of cheap beer mixed with something stronger, she is seeing the apartment buildings of her city and a man dressed all in black with eyes as blue as the sea.

She knows, just as she knows the words to this song, that he is the one who picked it.  And she knows _him_ – his sea-blue eyes, full of loneliness and full of wonder.  There was a man on the balcony, the night of the engagement party.  She had thought she dreamed him – but if she dreamed him, then she is also dreaming _this,_ and she could not be dreaming this.

Her eyes meet his.

_Full of loneliness and full of wonder._

She feels a sensation of clarity as cold as diving into the deep end of a pool – she knows the sparks in his veins and the weight on his back and the feeling of _lift_ at this moment, as though he was thrown from the top of a skyscraper and discovered that he could fly.  He is flying, and she is flying with him.

She could live in this moment forever – and it almost seems as though she does, as she travels from her rooftop to a nightclub in Berlin _(how does she know this is Berlin)_ and then back to her bedroom, all while looking deep into his eyes.  If her city is a million tiny candles, he is the monsoon that will drown them all out – and he is moving closer closer _closer –_

When her sister pushes open the blinds, he vanishes as suddenly as a dream.  But his presence lingers like a second shadow, and that song remains stuck in her head until the day of her wedding.

 

The song remains stuck in her head until the day of her wedding.

But what she doesn’t realize, at first, is that the sound playing in her mind like a broken record is not the song itself – not the intensely edited acoustic guitar or the strangely high-pitched vocals – but the voice of a man in Berlin.  A man who dresses all in black but smiles when he sings – a man who is awake and drunk when she is preparing for bed even though her city must be at least two hours ahead of his – a man who is somehow, inexplicably, in her bathroom.

This meeting of the minds (meeting of the bathrooms) is infinitely more mundane than the song on Kala’s rooftop, and that makes it infinitely less plausible.  How can she talk to him, while she stands in a bathroom in her home in Mumbai and he in a bathroom in a club in Berlin?  How can they understand each other, even though he must be speaking German and she in Hindi?  How can she be connected to _him_ , of all people, when they have nothing more in common than their taste in music?

And why – _why_ – is she so drawn to him, when she knows next to nothing about him?

She wants to ask him all of these questions and more, but before she can start on them, he is replaced by her aunt, saying something about _things that happen on a girl’s wedding night._   _We have the Internet for that,_ Kala replies, and it’s enough to dispel her aunt, but it’s not enough to quiet her racing mind – to stop her asking _how_ and _why_ and _what_.

Kala lies on her back in bed, staring up at the ceiling, memories of those two conversations running together until she isn’t sure where one ends and the other begins.  Her mind feels like a bike rushing through the streets on a festival day, constantly swerving to avoid curbs and buildings and people.  Part of her wishes Ganesha would appear, to provide her with a complete set of textbooks full of detailed instructions on how to live her life.  And a different, hidden part of her wishes that German man would appear again, to sing her to sleep or maybe teach her about _things that happen on a girl’s wedding night_ in a way that no article on the Internet ever could –

She sits up, brings her knees to her chest.  There’s no way she’s getting any sleep tonight unless she does _something._  And maybe it’s the nervousness of _a girl’s wedding night_ or maybe it’s the sudden connection to Berlin still sparking with energy or maybe it’s something else entirely, but she knows exactly what that _something_ is going to be.

Kala lowers her knees and spreads her legs ever so slightly, then reaches one hand down beneath her pajama shorts.  She’s never tried this before – her friends at university all raved about what a great stress reliever it was, but she never had the time or the inclination to do it herself.  Well.  No time like the present.

She runs one tentative index finger up and down, its touch feather-light and shaky.  Kala takes her time finding the hole in the center, demarcating it by circling its surface, then plunges her finger in – as sudden and half-unexpected as diving into a pool.  The sensation reminds her of putting in a tampon – not exactly what she was going for.  So, she tries moving the finger around, rubbing against the walls of her vagina, searching for that special gland that all her friends joke their boyfriends can’t find.

Is that it?  Did she find it?  Or is she just thinking that because she wants to believe she’s found it?  God, this is already exhausting.

Kala tries to imagine what girls usually do when they masturbate.  Watch porn, she thinks.  Or read it.  Or imagine it.  She doesn’t have any porn handy (and doesn’t exactly have a ready explanation for why she’d need to take the family computer in the middle of the night, so she can’t easily find some), but she can imagine.

She tries… picturing Rajan’s face.  That’s not helping at all.  Picturing Rajan’s dancing at the party, bringing back the feeling of his hands on her.  That’s slightly better, but still not doing much.  She pictures Rajan in different positions – kissing her, undressing her, even climbing into her bed and sliding down to replace her finger with his tongue – and somewhere in the middle, she stops picturing Rajan and starts picturing bright blue eyes, sharp nose, golden hair – she hears an impossibly familiar voice whisper _come on Kala come on_ – she feels her finger start to speed up its rotation almost of its own accord –

This is too much.  Almost scarily too much.  Kala yanks her finger out and stares at it as though it just touched hydrochloric acid, willing her labored breathing to slow down.  She thinks back to her friends at university, telling her she _has_ to try it, it’s _so_ relaxing, and is struck by a sudden urge to call them up one by one and shout at them.  If anything, that activity left her _more_ stressed than before.

Well.  All research is trial and error, and life is only a series of research questions, or something like that.  Clearly, impulsively trying masturbation on her own was a poor decision, so Kala will not attempt it again before doing a more thorough literature review.  Or she will just not attempt it again.  Either is fine.

Kala lies back down, closes her eyes, and lets her thoughts flow back to the singing man from her dream – not going down on her this time, but simply singing to her, his voice low and his eyes full of wonder.

 

_The moment when he arrives at her wedding – dripping wet and naked as the day he was born – is the moment when her choice to marry Rajan finally becomes real._

 

_You don’t know what I want._

_Don’t I?_

 

_From the moment I first saw you, I wanted you,_ he says.

But that is not quite right – not quite true.  He is used to _wanting_ people.  He knows that heat in his gut, that rush of blood to his cock, that drive to pull some beautiful girl (or guy, sometimes) away from the lights of the dance floor and trace their body with his mouth.  Wolfgang _wants_ someone every time he goes out dancing – it’s a sensation as natural as breathing.

And as he watches this girl from Mumbai _(how does he know she’s from Mumbai)_ run delicate fingers through his underwear, he knows that what he feels for her – has felt for her since their eyes met in a cheap Indian restaurant and on a balcony by the river – is something both more expansive and less definitive than _wanting._  If _wanting_ is the outline of a heart colored in with red marker, _this_ is a circle of red paint, covering outside the heart’s borders and expanding further out with each time Wolfgang sees her.

He doesn’t know what to call this.  He doesn’t know how to _deal_ with this.  And so he dials back, he pretends it’s only _wanting_ ( _wanting_ is easy) – he motions for her to join him on the bed even though he knows she wouldn’t dare – he teases her and tries to ignore the racing of his heart when she teases back.

She looked.  They both know where she looked, when he appeared naked at her wedding.  With any other girl, Wolfgang would know exactly what that means – but she is so far from _any other girl_ (or at least, from the girls Wolfgang has fucked) she might as well be on another planet.

His eyes meet hers.

And suddenly he can feel _everything_ – so many emotions at once he’s not surprised she keeled over at her wedding.  Nervousness and uncertainty and confusion and self-loathing _and,_ buried beneath the _my wedding is ruined_ and the _I will never be able to marry anyone ever again_ and the _how is this even physically possible_ , the same _not-quite-wanting more-than-wanting_ that he is feeling.

_You are a demon,_ she tells him.  And then she vanishes before he can reply that he is only human – if anyone in this room is a demon, it’s her.

 

Ganesha has sent Kala a demon.

She’s gone through all possible explanations, and this one is the most likely.  The night after he appears (naked!) in her bedroom, she takes out a blank notepad and blue pen (she always did her best work in blue pen, to the annoyance of her lab partners at university) and writes out all of the facts, as she understands them.

1\. One week ago, Kala agreed to marry Rajan Rasal.

2\. On that day, she began having visions.  The first of these was a woman killing herself.  The second was the sound of rain when the weather in Mumbai was sunny and clear.  The third was a man standing beneath her balcony, looking out over the river, yet also somehow sitting at a cheap Indian restaurant in Berlin.

3\. After those, she has had more visions – some of them less like visions and more like _sensations._  The heat of summer in Nairobi.  The cool smoothness of a prison floor.  The sharp burn of phantom restraints around her arms.  Sometimes these sensations are accompanied by the people (there seem to be seven) or spirits to whom she is now, apparently, connected.  Sometimes they are not.

4\. The one spirit/person/demon she has seen or connected to more than any other is the man from Berlin.  Here is what she knows about him:

a. He likes to sing.

b. He enjoys dancing and getting drunk, usually at the same time.

c. He is often naked.

d. He wants her.  In the sexual connotation of the word.

e. He is impossibly lonely and impossibly curious in ways she is not sure even he understands, but in ways that make her impossibly curious about _him_.  She wants to talk to him more, to examine his perception of the world, to understand experiences that she knows are so far from her own and a soul that she feels is so close.  She also wants to try certain _things_ with him that she has never wanted to try with anyone else.  She has no idea how any of this affects her impending marriage.

f. He has a rather large... male sexual organ.

5\. Their connection seems completely coincidental, yet also completely deliberate.  As though this man – a man in Germany whom she has never met – gives her confidence when she is uncertain, voices her questions when she does not know how to ask them, prioritizes her desires when she is overwhelmed.  The astrologer who told Kala that Rajan was a perfect match has clearly never met Wolfgang Bogdanow.

6\. Wait… how does she know his name?

7\. There must be some form of science, fantasy, or both behind… whatever is happening to her.  She just needs to do more data collection.

_8\. How does she know his name?_

Kala borrows her family’s computer, looks up connections to strangers in other countries, new sensations, strange visitations… A few Google searches in, there’s a tingle at the back of her mind, as though someone else has already done this research, but the connection isn’t strong enough to transfer knowledge.

“Ganesha?” she asks aloud.  “Is that you?”

She reaches at that connection, pulls herself toward t as though hoisting herself out of a pool – she wants to know, she _needs to know_ – but something slips at the last second and the almost-connection shatters.  She is left feeling as though she has less information than when she started.

But then, she is a scientist.  She is used to this feeling of failure.  Trial and error, trial and error.  Her new connections, whatever they are, are clearly psychic, because they are so tied to emotions.  They thrive on _feeling_.

Maybe this is genetic, a latent gene becoming active because of some sort of environmental trigger, like a specific temperature change triggering the flowering of a species of tree.  But if that is the case, what was her environmental trigger?  Her decision to marry Rajan?  Why would that choice bring on this host of abilities – seeing what other people see, hearing what others hear, sharing emotions, having conversations across continents… What is the universal purpose of all of this?

To teach Kala a lesson, she supposes.  After all, that’s why divine interference usually happens.  And something of this magnitude, this unable to be explained by known science – it _must_ be some form of divine interference.

Kala just wishes she knew _what_ lesson she is supposed to be learning.

 

Wolfgang tries not to think of her.

His mind wanders easily, always has – while he sits running the shop during a slow hour, or swims laps at the pool, or lies on his back waiting for sleep to find him, his mind slips its boundaries and dives headfirst into possibility.  But when Wolfgang used to think of safes he’d like to crack or songs he’d like to learn or ways to insult his relatives when they aren’t looking, now he thinks of her.

_Her._  Her smile.  her laugh.  Her expression when she looked at him – when they _understood_ each other better in three seconds than anyone else (except maybe Felix) has in Wolfgang’s entire life.

He’s not even sure if she’s real, to be honest.  Maybe she’s haunting him like a ghost, or – what did she call him? – a demon.  Maybe she’s a figment of his imagination, cobbled together from heroines of old movies and fantasy novels Felix forced him to read.

Wolfgang tries to convince himself that he dreamed her, but he knows it’s impossible – not only because the details of her city, her home, her wedding are too distant and too elaborate to be drawn from within his mind, but because she is more enchanting than any picture his mind could have constructed.  And some part of him, the part that never stopped believing in fairies ruling the woods and elves tucked into cabinets, desperately _wants_ her to be real, wants to believe that even after everything he has seen and done he still deserves to live in the same world as a woman who smiles like the sun and dances like she has only ever known love.

And so he falls slowly towards her, and he finds her everywhere.

The more he tells himself that she is in another country, she is from another world, she is about to be married to another man (much as she may not love that man) – the more Wolfgang is pulled to her.  He thinks he sees her at the club, her long, dark hair shining in the neon lights.  He spots her at his favorite café, ducking out the door just as his coffee is ready.  He just barely avoids reaching for a woman who almost looks like her at the pool, just before he is pulled into what he thinks is either a psychic orgy or the most realistic jerk-off fantasy he’s ever had.

Wolfgang tries to forget her.  Or at least, he wants to try to forget her.  He refuses to say her name, even to himself, as though that might summon her to him.  He tries to push himself to other thoughts, other people.

But it does nothing.  He is pulled to her, as naturally as though she is the sun and he is a comet, hurtling towards her irrefutable gravity.

 

_He tries to laugh at her, when he asks if she believes their connection is a miracle._

_She can tell he’s not really laughing.  He likes that she’s kind enough not to say it._

 

She says she wants him to leave her alone.  Both of them know she’s lying.

As much as his sudden presence infuriates her, it fascinates her.  This connection reminds her of piecing together reaction mechanisms back in organic chemistry, only more tangible, more tantalizing, more human.  And when he says he tries not to think of her – both of them know he’s lying, too.

_The weather’s shit in Berlin,_ he says.

What he doesn’t say – what she instead needs to feel, through the depths of his gaze and the racing of his heart – is that he lives for this weather.  He feels most human in this weather.  He is the only person at an outdoor café during a thunderstorm not because he likes the taste of watery coffee, but because he loves the slap of rain on his skin, the cold drops rushing through him like a waterfall.

For a moment, she is caught in a memory – a small boy with Wolfgang’s golden hair and Wolfgang’s blue eyes tilting his head up towards the clouds because _he wants to taste the sky._  And then the memory is snatched away quick as a gust of wind, and Kala is back _here_ – as much as she can be _here_ when she is in two places at once.

_(His arm reaches around her shoulders – an instinct for him to reach out, an instinct for her to lean in – a sudden warmth that scares her more than the sound of thunder.)_

It occurs to her, as she sits on the roof of her temple and outside his café, that although he is not a scientist, he views their connection in the same way she does.  He tests out definitions – god, miracle, sense – and questions realities, as she would when piecing together a new synthesis method.  He refuses to accept her surface or _their_ surface as a whole, as he would when cracking an uncrackable safe.

She tells him about the festival, lets him dive into her memories, and hears, somewhere in the back of her mind, the _click click click_ of tumblers getting closer to a solution.

When she first talked to him, she thought he wanted to have sex with her.  She could have avoided him (albeit with difficulty, if she is being honest), if that were true.  But now, she is realizing that he wants something different, or something greater – something like _understanding,_ or _companionship,_ or _truth._

She tells him about gravity, and feels something seismic shifting in the earth beneath her.  She forgets to ask _how_ she can talk to him and _why_ they were pulled together and _what_ she is supposed to do about it – she feels words and definitions and restrictions slipping past her like raindrops into a thunderstorm – she tells him about gravity.

When he is yanked away, she sits on the roof of the temple by herself for a long time, imagining the taste of rain on her skin.

_(Funny, how she doesn’t think to call their connection a miracle until she is staring into his eyes.)_

 

_I need to take a trip._

_Where?_

_India._

 

Wolfgang is budgeting a journey to Bombay in his head when Steiner makes his move.

The diamonds are failing them – and Wolfgang is leaping into one part contingency one part fantasy one part _you didn’t want to marry that guy –_ and there is a pretty girl in the window – and Felix is shooting backward like an inside-out comet, all guts and no glory – and the room narrows to a single point of blood spouting from the hole in Wolfgang’s brother’s chest.

Funny, how his entire world can shift on its axis in the space of a few seconds.  Hope to desperation.  Want to need.  Downpour to blinding sun.

But if he’s being honest with himself, he’s not surprised at this shift – new fortunes, metaphorical piss on his father’s grave, a connection with a girl in India who has made him smile more in a week than he has in the past year – it’s all more than he deserves.  He’s been waiting for the other shoe to drop since he met her gaze in that restaurant.  If he believed in gods, he would say that this is a punishment for his hubris, at thinking he could ever reach India in the first place.

He tells her as much when she appears in the hospital room, eyes wide and dripping with tears.   _I tried to change something that can’t be changed._ And he hates himself for the lines his gaze traces up her bare calves, for the ache in his fingers to cradle her cheeks, for the urge to pull her close and never let go.  He hates himself even as he invites her to sit next to him, even as he opens up his memories to help her understand precisely what Felix _means_ – this person who taught him the definition of the word _family._

_Felix loved the movies,_ he says, as though it isn’t killing him to use past tense.

Felix loved the movies.  Felix loved acting, loved joking, loved playing.  Perhaps he could have been one of those big names on the TV screen, if Wolfgang hadn’t walked into his detention room.  Sure, he always went willingly – joined the early schemes at robbing convenience stores and small cafes before Wolfgang could even ask for help, joking about how they were just like Robin Hood, only instead of robbing the rich to give to the poor they were robbing the poor to give to themselves – but Wolfgang made the plans.  Wolfgang dragged him into his family business.  Wolfgang made him who he is – who he _was_.  Wolfgang may as well have fired the gun that landed him in this hospital bed.

He turns, looks at Kala – and for a moment, he sees her on that bed, in Felix’s place.  When he looks up again, she has vanished.

 

Something is changing in Wolfgang.

Kala can feel it in the shape of his thoughts, as she sits next to him in the hospital – colors shifting darker, lines growing thinner, round edges sharpening to single points.  He is no longer the man who appeared in her bedroom singing about hope – he is sinking into his shadow, or perhaps rising to fill it.  Or perhaps he is peeling back layers to reveal a core that has always existed within, white-hot rage hiding beneath calm apathy like vents of molten lava lurking at the bottom of the sea.

_He would do anything for you,_ she says.  She does not voice the obvious converse: _You would do anything for him._

When she returns to the movie theater, eyes still wet with his unshed tears, she is thinking about energy.   _Cannot be created or destroyed – only transferred or transformed._  In a too-spacious apartment in Berlin, Wolfgang will soon begin transferring diamonds into weapons, loyalty into vengeance.  Perhaps he has not made the decision yet – or perhaps the decision was made for him the moment a shot was aimed at his brother.  She wonders what she would do, if someone attacked her sister.  Go to the authorities, probably.  Pray to her god.  Trust in karma and justice.

Wolfgang’s authorities have failed him.  His gods have failed him.  The only justice he trusts is that which he can wreak himself.   _Energy cannot be created or destroyed._   _Gods don’t give a shit about us._  His view of the world clashes with Kala’s, like fuel meeting oxygen to start a fire in her mind – a tiny part of her wants to watch him burn as much as most of her wants him to be rational.

But what does it mean to be _rational?_  To allow life to roll on down its path, unhindered by dreams or desires?  Or to understand that what a person gets out of life is what they put into it – that if you allow the world to order you around, you will never truly be free?

Kala is still thinking about energy when Rajan’s father meets her at the temple.

_Luck can only offer an opportunity,_ he says. _But without the will to make the right choice, luck would be as meaningless as that elephant-headed god._

A few months ago, Kala would have wanted to spit in his face for insulting her belief so harshly.  But now – as the figures in masks stand firm and threatening – as the most powerful man in Kala’s life is turned a helpless victim of gravity – as the steps of her temple are stained with blood – she is not so certain what gods or justice can do to help her.

 

Abraham definitely sold Wolfgang and Felix out to Steiner, but the asshole was right about one thing: the Holocaust memorial is a good place to make decisions.

_What is best in life?_

The question echoes in Wolfgang’s mind as though shouted from the top of a mountain, Conan’s voice mixing with Felix’s.  They watched that film every week, when they were kids.  Sometimes, they’d get to the end, look at each other for one moment, and rewind it back to the beginning to start over.  Now, Felix pulls it out whenever they’re too hungover to move, or whenever he’s been dumped, or whenever they need a little extra push working up the courage for a big heist.

_What is best in life?_

Wolfgang walks through the pillars.  Phantoms float in and out – faces he has never seen before yet recognizes in an instant.  A pale woman in a knit hat, wondering if she’s made a terrible mistake.  A tall woman with a tattoo of a power key behind her ear, fighting for strength.  A man in a clean white shirt, contemplating innocence.  A man with a silver chain necklace, fighting for a sense of control.  A woman in a prison uniform, wishing for a punching bag.  And Kala – dressed in yellow, hair perfectly combed – asking how to reconcile absolute violence with absolute love.

_What is best in life?_

A man with clear blue eyes and a strong sense of morality – _Will Gorski,_ Wolfgang somehow knows is his name – reads out the memorial’s inscription.   _Is the Holocaust an aberration or a reflection of who we really are?_  When Wolfgang was nine years old, his father told him the story of how he had cracked a man’s skull, just for refusing to sell him one more beer.   _That was back in East Berlin,_ he’d said.   _Fuck, they let you get away with anything over there, if your connections were good._  That same year, Wolfgang learned about the Holocaust in history class – millions slaughtered in gas chambers, and all he could think was at least they kept their skulls intact.

_What is best in life?_

Somewhere across the world, it is Independence Day.  Wolfgang can hear, as though through ten meters of water, children laughing and shouting.  A long-buried part of him aches to scoop all of them up and protect them from the world.  But this, he knows, would be futile – he cannot protect all of the world’s children.  He can only protect one person.  Maybe two.

_What is best in life?_

As he turns and walks away from Will, he feels _her_ slip into step beside him.  She has been thinking about energy – _cannot be created or destroyed_ – she is going to ask him to –

He knows what she is going to ask him to do, just as he knows that he will refuse.   _Would he rather have safety or revenge?  Would he rather have her, or know that she is safe and happy with someone else?_  The two questions are one in the same, and their answers were decided the moment Steiner shot – no.  The answers were decided the moment Wolfgang slid open a S &D safe.

_What is best in life?_

 

_What is best in life?_

_To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you!_

 

Here is the problem with Kala’s sensate connection: it keeps resisting definition.

_How does she know she’s now a sensate,_ she wonders, until she realizes she’s been eavesdropping on the conversations of a man named Will and someone older called Jonas.  She knows Jonas has told Will that sensates are _closer to human than bonobo is to baboon,_ and she knows that Wolfgang is preparing an arsenal of diamonds and ice, and she knows that Capheus first watched _Lionheart_ with his mother at ten years old when they had just purchased their first television.  He needs courage – she needs courage – eight people in seven countries are looking for courage, although she is not quite sure why.

She watches Capheus’ movie with him, tries not to look at the scenes of punching and kicking and stabbing.  For a moment, she sees Wolfgang’s face as Van Damme attacks – for a moment, she sees the assassins who sheltered at Ganesha’s temple as the enemy goons approach.   _Life is violent._  And life, it seems, is _connection._  Capheus has been asked to deliver an innocent girl to a gang leader seeking vengeance in order to protect his mother.  Kala has been implicated by a gang seeking vengeance because of the law supported by her fiancé’s father.  Wolfgang is preparing to enact vengeance because he failed to protect his brother.   _Eight people in seven countries are looking for courage._

Are similar themes running throughout their lives because they are connected, or were they connected because similar themes are running throughout their lives?

Kala’s fingers ache to reach for a notebook and pen, to start listing hypotheses and evidence and potential experiments.  But what would an experiment even look like?  There are so many variables at play, she is not even sure which to keep constant and which to vary, let alone how to vary them.  And even if she knew, a new variation of a pharmaceutical drug is nothing like a psychic link between eight people scattered across the world.  Testing this would require methods of a whole other level.  She would need to do something big: decide to go fight the extremist group at the temple of Ganesha, and see what happens.  Walk blindfolded into the streets of Mumbai during rush hour, and see what happens.  Fly to Berlin, and see what –

No.  All of these tests are dangerous, not only for her but also for seven other lives – _eight people in seven countries are looking for courage –_ and she has no mechanism to collect data, no format to record observations, no precedent to follow.  God, she doesn’t even have a _definition_.  She is so far away from a publishable paper on this connection, she may as well be on a different astral plane.

Kala hates feeling ignorant.  Even in university, when she was feeling lost in chemical formulas and reaction mixtures, she could reread her textbook, question her TAs, incessantly email her professors.  But now, there is nobody to ask – except perhaps _Jonas,_ and Will is a good cop but a terrible scientist, prioritizing all the wrong questions.

In another country, in the same universe, Wolfgang is preparing an arsenal.  She is only back in Mumbai for a few minutes, long enough to head back to her room and pull out the stack of papers on neural connection she printed out at work several days ago, before she is pulled to his apartment.  He assembles guns with a strange grace that almost reminds her of dancing; it’s terrifying in its beauty.

Part of her wants to tell him to stop, tell him this is too dangerous, tell him he doesn’t need to do this.  Part of her wants to build a bomb with the ingredients of his kitchen cabinet for him to bring along.

But before she can do either, he is pushing her away – _you don’t want to see this_ – and she is back at her desk, quietly fuming.   _How do you know what I want and don’t want to see?_  She pushes towards him, tries to find out how he is feeling, but is met with a determined block, the mental version of an iron wall.  

How is he already so adept at navigating this connection, she wonders.  But then, she thinks, he is not adept at the connection – only at shutting people out.

_He has been shutting people out all his life._

She sighs.  Ties her hair back in a loose bun.  Makes a pot of tea.  There is no way she’s sleeping tonight, so she pulls out a pen and notebook and loses herself in experiments and definitions.  Trial and error, trial and error.  She will understand these connections if it kills her.

And yet, as music rushes over her later that night, transporting her from a review paper on chemical control of neural synapses to the first row of the mezzanine in an enormous concert hall – she has never been to a concert like this before but somehow she knows that this is the best seat in the house – the violins surge the piano soars the woodwinds sing – and she is the sound of rain filling the streets she is the cries escaping her mother’s lips she is the tiny eyes opening to light and color for the first time – she is eight children across the world breathing as one – she is something not quite human and more than human – it is not the connections that resist definition it is the _people themselves –_

Kala realizes that she does not need to understand what is happening to her in order to enjoy it.

 

_The next morning, she races downstairs to the restaurant.  Her mother is about to put the kettle on for that day’s first pot of tea when Kala barrels into her, captures her in an embrace._

_“What was that for?” she asks, voice accusing but eyes smiling softly._

_“I just – felt like saying thank you,” Kala replies.  “For everything.”_

 

For a moment, Wolfgang doesn’t want to help Lito.

He looks down on the ground at this man – this crafted porcelain figure of a man, just push him too hard and he’ll shatter there on the pavement.  Only a shell of a man, filled with lives that he pretends to lead until he believes he has courage.

Only a shell of a man, and he has it so easy.  One punch in the right direction – maybe three punches, if the first doesn’t land – and he will win back the love of his life.  He will lose a career he’s been working towards for as long as he can remember, sure, but what is a career, compared to happiness?  Compared to companionship?  Compared to a life with someone who knows your faults like their own arteries and loves you anyway?

Wolfgang is asking himself questions like this more and more often, these days.

One punch in the right direction, and Lito can have all of that.  But he was never trained to fight – only to play at fighting – and cannot quite throw it.  The way he is lying there, staring up at the sky as though praying to the sun, he’s asking Wolfgang to throw that punch for him.

And Wolfgang almost doesn’t do it.  He pictures Kala, close as a heartbeat yet barred by his past and her future – a wedding she must perform and a house he must enter – he even sees her for a moment, sitting at her desk, measuring out solutions with that look of intense concentration, not noticing him yet turning, turning, just before he lands back here.

He wishes winning her were as easy as one punch.  But if it were, he might not want her at all.

Lito is only an overpainted porcelain doll of a man.  And yet, porcelain dolls are not all surface – are not all looks – if the situations were reversed _(and they were, only hours ago)_ , Lito would be up and fighting in a heartbeat.

And so Wolfgang fights.  One punch.  Two punches.  Three.  If Lito realizes who’s face he’s imagining when he aims at Joaquin, he doesn’t say anything.

 

The first time they kiss, Wolfgang knows he is about to die.

He’s come to terms with that fact.  Has accepted it, the way a pioneering chemist accepts that her work with radiation is one day going to kill her.  If Wolfgang’s life is the price he has to pay for ending the monstrosity that calls itself the Bogdanow dynasty, it’s a price he is willing to pay.  His only regret is that Felix isn’t here to go down fighting with him.

Well – no.  That’s a lie.  His only regret is sitting in the passenger seat, trying to convince him not to do it.

_Just turn the wheel, and the future changes._

Here is what he does not say: there are two futures I want.  In one of them, I go into that house.  In the other, I go to India.  I don’t need to understand the laws of probability to know that the second of these two futures has infinite chances of failure, and so I must choose the first.

Here is what he does, instead: leans close, pulls her in, hopes that she will understand why he needs to do this – hopes that when he dies, he will remember this.

_This is why I’m here.  After what I did, as long as that man is alive, no one I care about will ever be safe._

When Wolfgang was six years old, his mother took him to the ocean.  It was the only family vacation he ever had, planned in the interval between his father’s jobs with Sergei.  His mother lay on the beach reading, his father went for long walks, and Wolfgang became king of the sea.

He would take three running steps, then dive into the water.  And the ocean rose up around him, clear and cool, the rest of the world sinking away until all he felt was the pounding of his lungs and the power of gravity, pulling him towards the center of the earth.  Underwater, Wolfgang was not a crier or an amateur box man or a perpetual bad guy in schoolyard games – he was not a collection of hopes or feelings or fears – he was only _Wolfgang,_ honest and unafraid.

Kissing Kala is like diving into the ocean.  The world sinks away – his heart pounds – he allows himself one second, two, three until he returns to the surface.

_Three more seconds, and he would have stayed underwater forever._

 

Kala has never hated another person the way that she hates him.

Resigning himself to death to protect _her_ , as though that isn’t the most ridiculous reason she’s ever heard, as though she is even remotely worth it – whispering _this is an experiment like you wanted, what happens to the rest if one of us dies_ as though she wouldn’t rather have him safe than a hundred pages worth of research on their connection – appearing at her lab bench _I’ve come to say goodbye_ as though that is acceptable for even a second.

This is unacceptable.   _He_ is unacceptable.  She hates him for riding into his death so apathetically like Conan or Capheus’ Van Damme, and she hates herself for caring so much about a man who sees violence as the only solution.

And yet she finds her hands moving almost of their own accord – chemical formulas dancing in her head waiting to be pulled into action – vinegar and aerosol and spices enough for a reaction that will transfer her energy to him – _crying won’t help him_ – _I know how to fight_ –

She hands him a bomb.  And for a moment, she remembers how Rajan filled her office with flowers on her birthday.   _This is tangible proof that he likes you,_ her friends said.  Tangible proof.

Somehow it is this moment, cowering behind a refrigerator, her bomb in his hands and the echo of gunfire in her ears as she kisses him, that convinces her he is real.

She kisses him for one heartbeat – two – three.  Then she watches from behind her desk as he lights the fuse, tosses her bomb over his makeshift barricade.  The explosion reverberates through her and she wonders for a moment, half outside herself, what her face must look like to her coworkers.

He walks down the hallway.  She is one step behind him.

 

_She is one step behind him._

_Through the hallway.  Down the staircase.  Into his memories.  He feels the exact moment when she starts to cry._

_What kind of man betrays his own fucking family?_

_No kind of man.  Only a monster._

_He wishes he could tell her that he does not enjoy this.  But he hears her count twelve bullets, fired point-blank into his uncle’s chest._

 

_That’s why you have to marry Rajan._

 

_That’s why you have to marry Rajan._

The words echo in Kala’s mind like a broken record.  She tries to break the statement down – tries to understand what happened at Sergei’s house the way that she would a complex paper – introduction, methods, results, conclusion, discussion.   _As long as that man is alive_ – introduction.   _Twelve bullets_ – methods.   _A house full of bodies_ – results.   _My father was a monster, and so are you, and so am I_ – conclusion.

_That’s why you have to marry Rajan._

This statement, so firm in its conviction, is only the discussion.  The tail end of the paper, often written at the last minute before submission, researchers half-inventing global medical relevance or some reference to climate change in order to convince their reviewers that this topic is important enough to warrant publication.  Any reader is welcome to contest the interpretations, the next steps, the questions set up in that discussion.

_That’s why you have to marry Rajan._

Kala is back at her lab bench, then at a facility in Iceland.  She operates on autopilot, pipetting solutions and finding antidotes as easily as breathing in and out, in and out.  Nobody asks her why she is crying.   _Everyone around me dies,_ Riley says, and Kala does not add that she shares this self-made bad karma with another member of their cluster.

_That’s why you have to marry Rajan._

Iceland plays out like a nightmarish movie.  Ambulance, helicopter, ambulance, mountain.  For a moment, Kala sits next to Wolfgang as he drives into destruction.  He stares straight ahead – does not look at her.

_That’s why you have to marry Rajan._

Here is what it takes for Riley to get back into that ambulance: the courage of seven people in seven countries.  Here is what it takes for Kala to walk home after work and tell her family that nothing is wrong: the courage of one woman desperately wishing to contest a hypothesis with insufficient empirical evidence.

_That’s why you have to marry Rajan._

Kala sits next to Wolfgang on a boat leaving Iceland.  She does not look at him.

_That’s why you have to marry Rajan._


	2. part ii

 

**_ii. for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction._ **

 

The night after Wolfgang fires twelve bullets into his uncle’s chest, Kala makes a pro-con list.

She sits cross-legged on her bed with a notepad and a mug of tea.  The yellow sheet of paper is easily divided into four sections: _RAJAN – PROS, RAJAN – CONS, WOLFGANG – PROS, WOLFGANG – CONS._  The part of her that still shrieks whenever her favorite Bollywood actors appear on television is thrilled at the prospect of choosing between two attractive men, but most of her hates this.  People in the world must fight every day just to stay alive – she knows, she’s connected to some of them – and here she is, agonizing over whether to marry one man or take her chances with the other.

She hears a barely contained snort somewhere to her left – it appears Sun is laughing at her.

“I’m not,” Sun says.

Kala shakes her head.  “It’s okay.  I’d be laughing at myself, too.”

“I’m glad you’re finally making this decision, though,” Sun tells her.  “All that confusion was giving me a headache.”

 _Just because I’m making a list doesn’t mean I’m making a decision,_ Kala thinks – but Sun matches her gaze with an even stare, lets her know that she does _need_ to make this decision – she can’t help her cluster properly while she’s stuck in limbo.

She sighs, takes one sip of her tea, leaves the mug on the bedside table where Sun can reach it if she wants some, and begins to write.

The notepad is soon full of carefully penned bullet points – overwhelmingly in Rajan’s favor, as Kala knew it would be.  His pros are all things like, _my parents love him_ and _would provide a steady income and lavish lifestyle,_ while his only cons are, _I don’t love him,_ _his father disapproves of my faith and possibly still our marriage,_ and _the class difference is often awkward._  Meanwhile, the Wolfgang list is the opposite, full of cons like, _he’s avoiding me, he lives a continent away, he is involved with very dangerous people, my parents would hate him, I have never met him in person._

(Wolfgang has only one pro to his name, a line that Kala scrawled quickly and then avoided facing, as though it’s liable to jump off the page and bite her if given the chance: _I think I’m falling in love with him.)_

There is no new information on these lists, but laying it all out in neatly organized boxes makes this decision easier for Kala to process.  Like this, she can pretend that she is only picking between two types of cereal, or two similar dresses, rather than a path for the rest of her life.  She can make the correct choice based on empirical evidence, like a reaction proceeding down the path of lowest energy.

But reactions don’t always choose the path of lowest energy, the path of least resistance, the path of highest logic – sometimes, two compounds will connect in a means unexplainable by the laws of probability and form an end result more elegant, more beautiful, than what either of them could have created in any other reaction.

Kala turns her head a breath too slowly, and catches a face in her mirror.  Sky-blue eyes, resigned expression.  She opens her mouth to speak, and he is gone.

 _You stopped your wedding, but it’s still going to happen,_ he said.  She wonders if he did the same exercise that she is doing now – if he made lists, reduced potential futures to a single page – or if he simply knew, the moment they first made eye contact, why she had trapped herself in a loveless marriage when Rajan first proposed, and why she will trap herself again now.   _That’s why you have to marry Rajan,_ he said.  That discussion is unconnected to its conclusion, but she has no way of proving how little she fears him unless she turns her back on her duty, turns her back on her family.  And, like Wolfgang, she has a family worth protecting.

The truth is, her decision was made the moment her father began dancing around the house after he received Rajan’s proposal.

 

_The next morning – after the knocks on the door of Rajan’s new office, after she tells him she has decided to go through with the wedding, after he picks her up and spins her around and exclaims his delight to the world – she locks herself in a bathroom stall and sits there for almost an hour, rereading the same two pages of a paper on signaling in the temporal lobe over and over again.  She does not cry._

 

On the day of her wedding, Wolfgang almost flies to India.

The fantasy goes like this: she is making the final turn of her wedding vows, her dress trailing behind her like an aquamarine sunset.  She pauses on the word _union_.  She looks up –

_What the fuck are you doing?_

He is standing in the aisle, leather jacket hanging open, hair still messy from the plane, face unable to hide the beginnings of a grin.

 _Oh, no._  She takes a step forward, raises her arms – he remembers how she called him a demon, once. _Oh no.  Not again._

He takes two steps forward.  Hears, as though through static on the radio, the voices of her relatives and Rajan’s, wondering who this man is, how he got in, how he can speaking perfect Hindi.  The voices fade into white noise as he looks at her.

 _Yes, again,_ he says.   _But this time, I’m wearing clothes.  And this time –_

He takes three steps forward.  Four.  Five.  Until he’s facing her on the podium, a breath away from touching her – and some part of him had not quite believed she was real until this moment, until his heart leaping to his throat, until her eyes meeting his –

 _You’re really here,_ she says, so quietly only he can hear it.

He nods.  Stops resisting the urge to grin.

She turns away, and he can feel the rush of courage and selfishness in her veins just before she announces –

_Rajan.  Family.  Friends.  I am sorry, but I cannot allow this wedding to continue.  Rajan Rasal is a wonderful, caring man and will make some woman very happy one day.  But I do not love him._

And she turns once again – and she steps forward – and –

Wolfgang watches the scene play out, sitting in front of his computer at two o’clock in the morning, finger poised to click _reserve seat_ on an early-morning flight to Mumbai _._  The fantasy is like a movie in his mind, so real he can almost touch her.  But then, he closes his eyes and pictures the look on her face when he shot his uncle – pictures her lying in a hospital bed next to Felix.

He shuts his laptop and goes to bed.

 

He is very bad at avoiding her.

Kala knows this because she keeps almost catching him, in the days after his family’s murders and her wedding.  He always vanishes just as she notices his presence, but he is _there_ – one table away at the restaurant, one stall behind in the market, one wave beyond in the ocean.  Sometimes, when she walks through Bombay, she can swear she hears two sets of footsteps instead of one.

It makes sense, in a way, that he would want to do this.  It’s simple thermodynamics: action and reaction.  He went into his uncle’s house, so he soaked his hands in blood.  He soaked his hands in blood, so he pushed her away.  He assumed that she decided to marry Rajan for the same reason he thought she should, a natural next experiment after his first paper’s discussion.

A few seconds, a short conversation, and she would be able to correct him.  She could explain that she’s not frightened of him, not ashamed of him.  She’s frightened _for_ him, perhaps – keeps hearing whispers of family members begging him to take command, other kings courting him for alliances, and she wonders if revenge has gotten him over his head in this pool of blood that is the Berlin underground – but she understands.  Or she _wants_ to understand.

_There are things I will never understand about your world, just as there are things you will never understand about mine._

_If you think like that, I’m never going to understand!_ she wants to shout at him.   _If you keep closing me off, if you don’t let me ask questions, our worlds are just going to get further away!  Just talk to me!_

She wants to shout at him.  Gods, she wants to shout at him.  She wants to grab his hands and _shake_ him, capture him like a leaf in a hurricane, force him to meet his eyes and get her face up close to his and pull him in close and –

And.

She misses him.  That’s the problem.  She’s barely known him a month, and not speaking to him feels like cutting off one of her arms.  She sees his face when she closes her eyes at night, hears his voice when she loses focus on her work.  She keeps reaching for him – pulling him closer – action and reaction – if she is thinking of him he must be thinking of her – but he always slips into the shadows before she can get too close.  He always locks the door behind him.

And then, it’s their birthday.  The whole cluster celebrating as one – _we shared our first breath_ – Will visiting for the first time in weeks – fears of Whispers and BPO falling away as eight people in seven countries dance their hearts out.  Kala jumps into the air, she moves her hips, she throws her hands in the air until she is weightless as the clouds in the sky above her.  She’s in Nairobi, she’s in Kenya, she’s in Amsterdam, she’s in Mexico City, she’s in Berlin –

She’s in Berlin.

The scientist in her knows that this is her chance to corner Wolfgang, to properly talk to him, to make him explain the mechanics of his world and precisely why he does not think she can be a part of it.  But the scientist in her is pushed away – maybe by Lito, maybe by Riley, maybe by the young girl who always loves movies with incredible dance scenes – and all she can do is smile with him, dance with him, take his hands and share this feeling of weightlessness –

Riley walks Kala up to the DJ stand and asks if she can spin.   _Anything is possible in Positano,_ the man says.  

 _Anything is possible._  When he said _anything_ she could not have imagined _this_ – a dance floor in Berlin or Mexico, she’s lost track – her back pushed up against his chest, his hands on her waist, so close it’s as though he is trying to pull her inside him – for a moment the pounding bass sounds like the rumbling of thunder – they jump together and she wonders if he can hear her heart begging him _not to let go_ – she _wants_ –

And then, the scene shifts.  Rajan is behind her, Wolfgang is in front of her.  Her eyes meet his, and suddenly she understands – he is not only avoiding her because he believes she is frightened of him, but also because he is frightened of wanting too much.

He stumbles off the dance floor.  Every cell in her body aches for her to follow him.  But she holds herself back.  Holds herself back – even as she can’t quite remember why she must.

 

_We exist because of sex._

 

Kala should, by all rights, be ready for this.

She knows how sex works.  She’s read the textbooks, she’s watched the videos.  She’s even taught basic sex ed to one of her younger cousins.  And earlier tonight, she participated in a – well – she’s not entirely certain what to call it, but it was certainly a good form of instruction into the act of sex.  A fully immersive example.  She felt her cluster-mates’ want rolling over her like waves, pulling her in and filling her until she was no longer one but _many_ , a mass of skin seeking connection and warmth and heat.

Now, standing in front of her mirror, all of that _want_ vanished like a breeze in the night, she wishes she’d taken notes.  Why did Nomi bite down on Kala’s bottom lip like that?  Why did Riley run fingers down her thigh?  Why did Capheus suck on her breast as though it was a particularly sweet ice cream cone?  She can remember all of the actions so clearly, but the motivations are an enigma without her cluster there to provide them – like a textbook written in a language she cannot read.

Still, just because she cannot figure out why sex is worth the time and effort does not mean she cannot go through the motions.  For all intents and purposes, she just practiced this a couple of hours ago.  And she’s done a thorough literature review – if this were a chemistry exam, she would be fully confident in her ability to beat the curve.

Kala examines her reflection in the mirror, as she might examine a new reaction at her lab bench.  She is wearing red – red lipstick, red heels, red lingerie.  Red is a sexy color.  Her hair is down, all combed – it will probably get in the way, logistically, but it looks sexy.  Or at least, she thinks it does.  What is _sexy,_ anyway?  What is the word’s definition?  Appealing in the context of sex?  Is anything universally sexy, or is it all in the eye of the beholder?

Is _Kala_ sexy?

She stares at herself in the mirror, desperately trying to solve this equation, when Wolfgang appears in her mind.   _From the moment I first saw you, I wanted you._  She is sexy in the eyes of at least one beholder – it has been empirically proven, not only because he told her, but also because she _felt_ how he wanted her, skin aching for skin, a bulge in his sheets.

Okay.  Kala is sexy, to at least one person.  That will have to be enough.  She takes three steps forward, opens the door, and –

Wolfgang is there.  Having sex.

Of course he’s there – it’s simple thermodynamics, action and reaction – she is thinking of him and he is thinking of her – but the sight of him on his back, cock in another woman’s –

It feels like a monsoon, knocking her backward.

Kala tries to process everything she is feeling.  Takes it apart the same way she would a mechanism question, examines each individual part for its purpose.  She wants Wolfgang to leave.  She wants to have sex with her husband – or, well, she wants the social clout and the feeling of satisfaction that she imagines will follow sex with her husband.  She wants Wolfgang to stay.  She wants Wolfgang to be in her bed instead of Rajan.  She wants to be in Wolfgang’s bed instead of this nameless girl.  She wants to understand what is so desirable about this sex thing in the first place.  She wants to be in her bedroom at home with a cup of tea and complete peace and quiet to solve this problem once and for all.

The purpose of sex is evolutionary.  Humankind must complete the process of reproduction in order to propagate as a species.  And the logical person for Kala to propagate this species with is her husband, to whom she has sworn vows of loyalty and unity – except that, technically, she and Rajan are _not_ the same species, so in order to propagate her actual species, she should be having sex with –

She leans down to kiss Rajan, and ends up almost kissing Wolfgang.  Logical, but completely immoral.

From a social standpoint, however, the purpose of sex is to propagate culture.  If a culture does not support the act of reproduction, then there will be no new generation to carry on the language and traditions of that culture once the old generations die out.  Rajan is part of Kala’s culture, is in fact a leader in her culture, and so logically she should want to support him in continuing it and pushing it forward – except that she does not share his ideas about self-determination and the uselessness of belief – but Wolfgang does not share her faith in gods and miracles, so why is it so hard for her to stop watching _him_ –

She tells him to leave, and he changes position.  Climbs to his knees so that he can get right in her face as he demonstrates just how confident he is in his desire.  He knows all of her confusion, she knows he can feel it every time they make eye contact, and yet he keeps _baiting her_.

Kala hates him.  And she wants him.  And she wants to _be_ him – she wants that confidence, that certainty, that bone-deep knowledge that he should have sex because it makes him feel good, and for no other reason.

She feels an inkling of that want, when she meets his eyes, but she can’t figure out if it’s actually her own or only a reflection of his want, like what she had felt when she had sex with the whole cluster.  In order to truly separate her desires, in order to piece through why sex is worth the time and effort, she needs to talk to him.  Maybe about this, or maybe not – maybe she just needs him to stop avoiding her.  Or maybe –

Kala feels her mind running in circles, spinning like a top pushed out of control.  She can’t do this.  Not here, not now, maybe not ever.   _She can’t do this._

When Rajan falls and breaks his penis, she’s almost relieved.

 

When he wakes up, she is sitting at the foot of his bed.

Her hair is pulled into a loose ponytail, and her legs are crossed like a statue of a pilgrim at prayer, and there are circles under her eyes darker than the mug of tea in her clasped hands.  Wolfgang looks at her, and he feels her heart race as she watches him wake – part nervousness, part excitement, part something else altogether.

“We need to talk,” she says.

“Okay,” he replies.

He looks at her.  She looks at him.  He feels the world around them shift – she is sitting at the foot of his bed in Berlin, and he is sitting next to her in a stiff-backed waiting room chair in Positano.  He sees a rack of magazines in a language neither of them understands, hears the low hum of classical music, smells antiseptic and chloroform.  She has been in this waiting room for ten hours.  She has not spoken to another human being in six.

He feels her exhaustion, the undercurrent of fear, and all he wants to do is put his arm around her, draw her into his side, whisper something warm into her ear – but he can’t.  He isn’t quite sure how to talk to this new Kala, this _married_ Kala – isn’t sure how to ask for permission.

“How is your husband?” he asks instead.

“He’s fine – it was a phantom fracture,” she replies.  “I’m just waiting while they run a few more tests, just in case.”  And then she loosens her legs out of their knot, sets her mug of tea down on a small side table.  “But that’s not what I want to talk about.”

“What do you want to talk about?”

Wolfgang moves closer – suddenly back in his room.  He lets the sheets cover his lower half – wonders if he should find a shirt.  (The girl from last night is long gone, the only remaining trace a whiff of cheap perfume.)

“Look, I know you’ve been watching me,” Kala says.

Wolfgang stiffens.  Replays her words – _we need to talk_ – she’s going to tell him to stop visiting, or that she’s devised some chemical concoction to cut herself off from the cluster, or –

“It’s stupid, and it’s selfish,” she continues.  “You think I can’t see you, standing in the shadows, like you believe you’re not worthy of actually talking to me, or like you think I’m afraid of you –”

“You aren’t?” Wolfgang cuts in.

“Of _course_ I’m not.”  Kala’s raising her voice now, from a half whisper to a thunderstorm shout, and Wolfgang is glad _she’s_ visiting _him_ because the innocent hospital patrons of Positano probably would not take kindly to her lecturing thin air.  “Yes, I was scared when I watched what happened at your uncle’s house.  Of course I was.  But I wasn’t scared _of_ you – I was scared _for_ you.  I was worried about what you other relatives might do when they found out, or what the police might do – and then I was worried about what might happen if you refuse the offers of all the powerful mob bosses courting you like a damsel in an old movie –”

_She knows about that?_

_“Yes,_ I know about that,” Kala practically explodes.  “You’re not the only one who’s been watching.  But every time I get close to you, every time I feel you visiting, every time I so much as google _Berlin,_ you pull away!  And I’m tired of it.  If we don’t talk about this, it’s just going to keep boiling over until neither of us can do anything without pulling the other in somehow.”

 _That wouldn’t be so bad,_ Wolfgang thinks.  But he knows she doesn’t want him appearing in her marital bed anymore, much as he might have found the experience hilarious (and much as he’s going to dream about that little red thing she was wearing for the rest of his life).

Her face flushes as she catches on to the image in his mind.  Maybe she just wants him to stop getting involved with her sex life – maybe that’s the real reason she’s finally confronting him, the raindrop that broke the dam.

“Look,” Kala says, her voice quieter, more confident.  “I know things have changed.  You have risen in the ranks, whether you accept your new power or not.  I am… married.  But I still care about you, and about what’s going on in your life.  I… I’ve missed you.”

He nods.  He doesn’t need to say that he’s missed her, too – she already knows.  Just as she knows he is stepping into her memories, finding a pad of paper divided into four sections, a decision made out of duty, not out of fear.

 _Protect your family above all else._  Maybe her world is not so far from his, after all.

“So.”  She looks at him, dark eyes meeting sea blue.  He sees her confidence, her empathy, her brilliance – and for a moment, he is so jealous of her fucking _husband,_ he wants to dive into the Spree River.  “No more avoiding me.”

“Okay,” he says.

“Okay,” she repeats.

He moves closer, ever so slowly – and then somehow the scene shifts, and she is sitting next to him, both of their backs against the headboard of his bed.  He raises an arm, lifts it around her shoulders – she’s warm, her hair soft and smelling of oranges.  She drops her head onto his shoulder.  He takes a breath, lets it sink through his lungs – realizes he hasn’t been able to breathe this easily in months.

“That guy is an idiot for calling your mom, by the way,” Wolfgang says.  “You’ll have sex with him when you’re fucking ready to have sex with him.”

He feels, more than sees, her smile at that – and he feels something pulling in both of their chests, slow and powerful as a riptide.

They sit together for a long time.

 

“Nice job,” he says.

Kala is passing a broken-down fence on her way to the bakery that sells Rajan’s favorite pastries, when his voice stops her.  Stops her – induces her to turn back, look at him.

Wolfgang is perched atop the fence in his proverbial black, like a crow sitting atop a particularly sturdy telephone wire.  She wonders for a moment who brought him here – did he invite himself or was she unconsciously seeking him – before telling herself it doesn’t matter.

“Nice job at what?” she asks, adjusting her purse so that it hangs higher from her shoulder.

“Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about,” he replies.  His smirk tells her that further resistance would be pointless.

“You _saw?”_ she says instead.  She takes a step closer – _bad idea, Kala_ – close enough that she can smell cigarettes and black coffee – or a memory of them – on his breath.

His smirk changes color, shifts from self-satisfied to self-deprecating.  “You invited me.”

“Oh.”  And she steps back, out of something like self-defense, like Red Riding Hood retreating from the path of the wolf – only she isn’t sure now, which of the two she is.  “I didn’t realize.”

The thing is, her conception of herself as a sexual being is so tied to Wolfgang – tied to the one person who can _want_ her absolutely while simultaneously _respecting_ her absolutely – that he appears in her mind’s eye whenever she tries to convince herself she is ready.  She carried herself through last night by trying to see herself as he sees her – strong, smart, sexy, _confident_ – an equal partner, not someone to be coddled or sweet-talked or plied with elaborate gifts.  It is only logical that thinking of him, even indirectly, would bring him to her.  And she never saw him watching, but she felt, at moments, a jolt of warmth that was not her own.  Encouragement, confidence, flowing in her veins like molten fire rising up from the bottom of the ocean.

“I tried not to stay long,” he says, “but you kept pulling me there.”

“I’m sorry,” she replies.

His mouth twists in a smirk – and it’s that self-deprecating one again.  The one she hates.  “Don’t be.  Like I said, you did a good job.  I was impressed.”

He doesn’t say, _I wished you were doing those things with me._  He doesn’t say, _I know it was immoral for me to watch._  He doesn’t say, _We should sever this connection right now, it would be so much easier._  But she sees all these thoughts and more, burning in his sky-blue eyes.

 _Is this how it’s going to be, from now on?_ she wonders.   _He makes crude jokes, I act scandalized, we both pretend we’re not suffocating?_

 _It’s how this_ could _be,_ some voice in her head that sounds suspiciously like Sun says, _but it’s not how it_ has _to be._

“Well,” she says, forcing a grin, “I _have_ watched porn.”

At that, he starts to laugh – not self-deprecating or self-sacrificing but honest, unexpected, bright.  She can’t remember the last time she heard him laugh.

And then, with a shift of the clouds, he vanishes – and she stands there, staring at the empty space he left in her landscape, for countless seconds before going to buy her husband pastries.

 

He feels it the moment she notices the snow.

She’s stepping out on a lunch break – she’s stepping into the world – she’s reaching for something new – and then she is dancing into Wolfgang’s periphery, starry-eyed and gasping.

It’s only frozen water, fallen from the sky.  It’s only something that a fleet of trucks will need to shovel in the morning, something a thousand pedestrians will almost twist their ankles over on the way to work.  But as Wolfgang watches her drop to her knees and embrace the snow, a grin on her face so wide he thinks she could light up the entire river, he sees the snow the way _she_ sees it – particles of water that rose from oceans millions of kilometers away and traveled through clouds large enough to contain small cities and froze at high elevation, all so that they could drop into this precise location just off the Spree River at this precise time.  This snow will be brown and ugly tomorrow, but right now, the string of cosmic coincidences that has brought it here, to this moment, is nothing short of a miracle.

As Kala looks at him from her place in the snow, she knows that he would not be here in the first place if he did not see the snow in the same way as she does, at least a little.  Perhaps that’s what she means when she tells him he has something _good and wonderful_ inside – that the little boy who thought swimming pools were new worlds and stood in the rain eyes closed head tilted back because he wanted to taste the sky has not been entirely lost to anger and revenge.

But Wolfgang doesn’t have time to dwell on that thought – doesn’t have time to dwell on _any_ thought – because she’s moving again.  Dancing in his peripheral vision.  Pelting him with snowballs as though they’re kids on the playground, excited to go home early.  He plays along, tosses the snow back, watches her face light up – feels like he’s flying.

Maybe this is how the snow feels, he thinks, sailing up in the clouds before fate and gravity sends it crashing down to earth.  She pounces on him, she tackles him down, she moves so close he can almost taste her laugh, and –

_Shit._

It hits him like a bazooka to the chest: he’s in love with her.

It’s another small miracle that Felix chooses that time to walk by, because otherwise Wolfgang definitely would have done something he’d regret.

 

She dreams about going to Berlin, sometimes.

The fantasy goes like this: she leaves Rajan a short note explaining that she is terribly sorry, but she cannot be with him anymore.  She packs a simple bag.  She gets a cab to the airport, gets on a plane, gets another cab.  Knocks on his door once, twice, three times.  He opens the door – and for some reason (at least half the times she has this fantasy) – he is naked.  He looks at her – eyes blue as the sea, full of loneliness and full of wonder – and then his mouth stretches into a brilliant grin.

“Hi,” he says.

“Hi,” she says.  “So, I just left my husband, and someone once told me that the best place to go when you leave your husband is Berlin.  So, here I am.  Berlin.  But I’ve never been here before, I have no idea what to do, which sights are worth seeing, which clubs are worth dancing in.  I was hoping maybe you could –”

And he pulls her inside and draws her to him – kisses her like a drowning man finally tasting air – and for the first time in months she doesn’t feel confusion or sadness or loneliness but only feels _want_ – or _love_ – or something not quite either and more powerful than both.

 _This is a pretty unrealistic fantasy,_ Kala tells herself every time she finds herself imagining it.   _Mostly because you would never be able to limit yourself to only one bag._

 

_You have something good and beautiful hidden inside you, just as I have something dark and wicked inside of me._

If anyone else had said that to Wolfgang, he would have socked them in the jaw.  But from Kala, he almost believes it.

 _Maybe that’s because you’re in love with her,_ a quiet voice in Wolfgang’s head says.

He’s lying flat on his back in bed, arms folded behind his head, trying to make sense of that statement.   _I’m in love with her.  In love with her.  In love with her._  The thought came to him so naturally, so simply.  Like sliding open a lock.

But what does it _mean?_

“Hey, brother,” says someone behind him.

Wolfgang looks up, and Lito is standing there next to the bed.  And Lito is sprawled on the couch in Daniela’s apartment, Hernando and Dani dozing peacefully next to him.

“May I?” Lito asks.  Wolfgang nods, and moves over – makes enough room for Lito to stretch out next to him, their bodies two parallel lines.

“So, what’s going on?”

Wolfgang looks up at the ceiling.  Recounts the same cracks he has counted every night since he moved into this apartment three years ago.

“I’m in love with her.”

The statement feels strangely more permanent, now that he’s said it aloud.  Like a pencil sketch hung on an easel and transformed into a full-color painting, or a stream overflowing into a flood.

“That’s great!” Lito exclaims.  “I’m so happy for you.”

Wolfgang looks at him.

“Or… sad for you?” Lito amends his earlier statement.  “Although I’m not sure why you aren’t happy about this.”

“I’m… I don’t know how I feel about this,” Wolfgang admits.  “I don’t know what I _do_ with this.”

It’s strange – Lito’s best talent is lying, but somehow he makes the others more honest, his presence a waterfall washing them clean.

“Oh, that’s easy,” Lito says, raising his head up on one elbow.  “You tell her.”

Wolfgang shakes his head.  “I _told_ her to marry that guy.”

“Then why am I here?” Lito asks.

Wolfgang shrugs.  “To help me get rid of it, I guess.”

“Get _rid_ of it?”  The pitch of Lito’s voice goes up at least an octave.  He’s so dramatic about these things.  It’s funny.  “Are you _insane?”_

“I just told you, I can’t do anything with it.”

“But you can feel it, you can celebrate it, you can write terrible poetry about it – haven’t you ever been in love before?”

Wolfgang thinks for a moment, then shrugs again.

And then, before he has a chance to protest, he is dropped into a memory.  Lito and Hernando, grocery shopping at some store near Lito’s old apartment, something like seven months into their relationship.  Hernando is picking out bananas, examining each one carefully before he adds it to the bag like a jeweler evaluating fine diamonds, all while talking a mile a minute about the symbolic ramifications of placing the bananas next to the tomatoes instead of next to the apples.  He’s halfway through quoting some American poet Wolfgang (and Lito) has never heard of when Lito bursts out – _I love you._  Wolfgang feels his surge of emotion, his inability to hold back, like water rushing from a hole in a dam.

And Wolfgang watches as Hernando completely fails to respond, too wrapped up in his own thoughts.  He’s about to ask why the fuck he’s watching this when the scene shifts – Hernando standing in front of the stove in Lito’s kitchen, mixing a saucepan full of tomatoes and onions, Lito watching him from the counter nearby.

_And, see, the prevalence of this stereotype is in itself a deconstruction of the stereotype, because – wait._

_What?_

Hernando shuts off the burner and turns, slowly, to face Lito.

_What did you say to me earlier.  In the grocery store.  By the bananas._

Wolfgang watches a grin spread across Lito’s face like the sun coming out after a storm.   _I said, I love you._

_Say that again._

_I love you._

And then, they’re kissing – tomatoes and onions and bananas and the rest of the world forgotten.  The memory fades into a feeling of brightness and the color of late afternoon sunlight shining through Lito’s windows.

Wolfgang looks up, and Lito is smiling at him.  “See?”

_When you love someone, the whole world is brighter._

Wolfgang doesn’t quite get it.  But then, he thinks of _her_ – her smile, her laughter in the snow, the way she talks of miracles.  For a moment, he is in a kitchen in Bombay, watching from the doorway as she makes coffee, singing quietly to herself, early morning sunlight streaming in –

“Yeah,” Wolfgang says.

And the next morning, if Felix makes fun of him for coming into the room grinning like a loon – there’s not really much he can do about it.

 

_And it’s strange, what happens after that – Volker’s promise of money, power, and pussy like he’s never known would have had so much appeal for Wolfgang a few months ago.  But now, it only makes him laugh._

 

The thing about having sex with Rajan is… once isn’t enough.

Kala had thought that the last day of that honeymoon fixed everything.  Wolfgang was no longer avoiding her.  Rajan was no longer afraid of offending her.  Her virginity – for all that the damned thing mattered – was gone.  And the experience itself wasn’t bad.  It was appropriately tiring.  It was not as painful as she had expected.  And Rajan was attentive, caring – asked her constantly if she was okay, made sure he spent equal time pleasuring her as she did pleasuring him.

All in all, Kala would rank it before reality television and after reading the science section of the Mumbai Mirror in ways to pass the time.  She concludes that the objectives of sex are propagation and fulfilling societal obligation – the pleasure must come from somewhere else.  She’d like to carry out further trials in order to determine what this origin of pleasure is, but her sense of urgency has faded.  She can figure this out in a few months, maybe even a few years.

But just proving to Rajan that she _can_ have sex with him is not, apparently, tantamount to making her marriage a fully satisfied one.  He seems to want to do it all the time – after work, early in the morning, when they’re watching TV… even, sometimes, _at_ work during his lunch break, which to her seems scandalous – and, frankly, unsanitary.  She acquiesces sometimes, of course – he’s her husband, this is part of her duty – but almost every time, she would rather be sleeping, or eating, or working, or… the more times it happens, the longer that list gets.

And the more times it happens, the further she is from understanding _why_.  If sex is not, in fact, enjoyable, why does everyone seem to want it so much?  Or if it _is_ in fact enjoyable – as her observations of Rajan and her experience with the cluster seem to suggest – why doesn’t _she_ enjoy it?  She feels as though she’s testing the wrong variable in this experiment, but she doesn’t know what to change.  Is there a problem with the environment, or a problem with Rajan, or a problem with Kala herself?

She watches the others, trying to figure it out – Lito and Hernando, Will and Riley, Nomi and Amanita.  (Wolfgang seems to be having less sex lately himself – Kala tries not to dwell on what that might mean.)  They seem to get so much pleasure out of physical pleasure, Kala’s experience with Rajan seems like an entirely different activity.

One afternoon after a particularly trying _lunch break,_ Kala finds herself in a tiny apartment in San Francisco, staring at Nomi.

“Hey,” Nomi says, pulling back her headphones.  “Is something wrong?”

“No,” Kala answers. “Well, yes.  Well… I don’t know.”

Nomi meets her eyes and Kala opens up – lets the worry and uncertainty she’s been holding back flow over her – _something must be wrong with me what is wrong with me **what is wrong with me**_ – until her sister must be able to feel it, too.

“Okay.”  Nomi pats the empty chair next to her.  Kala sits.  Outside, she can hear cars rushing by, horns honking, dogs barking.  The sounds of the city are completely foreign, yet completely familiar.

“Before we talk, I have to ask.” Nomi says quietly.  “Has he ever… forced you?”

Kala shakes her head vigorously.  “Rajan is a good man.”

“I know,” Nomi replies.  “But good men are not always what they seem.”

It takes Kala a moment to understand what Nomi means, but when she does, she shakes her head again.  “He always asks what is okay and what is not.  And I’m fine with the things we do.  I am.  It’s just… I’m doing it more out of obligation than I am out of enjoyment, and I don’t understand why I can’t enjoy it.”

Nomi nods.

“And then,” Kala goes on, “I watch you and Amanita, or Lito and Hernando, or Will and Riley – or I remember what happened on our birthday – I feel what you feel when you’re doing it.  I get these overwhelming rushes of pleasure, contentment, love – but for me, it’s just like… I’d feel the same way if I was brushing my teeth.  What is wrong with me?”

“Oh, sweetie.”  Nomi moves in, throws her arms around Kala – warm and comforting and reassuring.  “There’s nothing wrong with you.  You just experience sex in a different way from other people.”

“Okay,” Kala says.

Nomi holds on for one more moment, then pulls back and asks, “Have you ever heard the term _asexual?”_

Kala shakes her head.  The word is English, and feels unwieldy on her tongue.   _Asexual.  A-sexual.  Not-sexual._

“It’s a bit of a blanket term for people who experience sexual attraction in a less all-consuming way than what society considers ‘normal.’  Like, they don’t experience it at all, or they experience it very rarely, they only experience it with certain kinds of relationships… I’m not sure I’m doing the best job of explaining it.”  Nomi turns to her computer for a moment, types a few words into a search engine, then moves her chair back to let Kala look at the website she pulled up.

It’s open to a chart of something called the _asexuality spectrum_ , and is full of terms Kala has never heard – _gray-ace,_ _demisexual, allosexual…_

 _Ace people can be completely averse to sex,_ the site says beneath the chart, _or they can enjoy it but won’t seek it out on their own, or they can view it as slightly uncomfortable but necessary, like brushing their teeth.  If you have ever looked at society’s obsession with sex and wondered why you just didn’t_ get it _– nothing is wrong with you.  Rather, you might be asexual._

“May I?” Kala asks, fingers poised to click on links at the bottom, her mind screaming in a way that it hasn’t since she saw the problem with her senior thesis experiment back at university.

“I actually… need that back,” Nomi admits, apologetic.  “But I’ll send you the link.”

And Kala spends her afternoon ignoring work for the first time she can remember.  Instead, she does a literature review.

 _Asexual._  Or something like it.  Kala doesn’t tell Rajan her new favorite word – doesn’t tell Wolfgang – doesn’t tell anyone.  She isn’t sure what the evolutionary or societal advantage of asexuality might be.  Why evolve a certain small fraction of the population (one percent, she reads in an article, although that number apparently comes from an old and potentially inaccurate survey and the true value is likely higher) to experience sexual attraction in a lesser capacity than the majority?

But then, she thinks back to grade school – when her friends sighed over some attractive young actor on a magazine cover, she shrugged and went back to her book.  She thinks back to university – she always left parties alone, and her friends always pitied her, but she was always the first one in the library the next morning.  She thinks back to her early days at Rasal Pharmaceuticals – her coworkers spent hours hypothesizing who the most attractive lab techs would ask out, while she broke the record for fastest synthesis record in her first month.

Perhaps, she thinks, asexuality is an advantage.  If she is not so driven by sex as those around her, she can be more driven by her curiosity.  She can devote more time to work – solving problems, finding cures.

Kala does not have the resources to test her evolutionary hypothesis.  And it is a poorly-theorized hypothesis at best – she is far from an ecologist, after all.  But its potential – and the knowledge that there are others like her, that her feelings are not _wrong,_ that there is a _definition_ she can attach to her identity – keeps the word _asexual_ tucked between her tongue until it grows confident and familiar.

She does not tell anyone her new favorite word.  But she becomes more comfortable in telling Rajan, _Not today.  I’m just not feeling it._

He is always disappointed, but he never presses her.  And each time, it feels like a tiny victory.

 

He takes her dancing.

He doesn’t mean to, he just – he is spinning beneath the lights, his feet light and his head perfectly empty and then – she is _there,_ dressed in a loose sundress and sandals, a raft of yellow in a sea overflowing with black and gray.

Today, Wolfgang and Felix scored a huge order, redoing all the locks in one of the biggest apartment complexes in Berlin.  It’s the first real chunk of honest money they’ve made in what feels like years – and tonight, they’re celebrating.  Wolfgang has been flying since their fourth shot – or maybe their fifth, he’s lost count -and it feels only natural that she be here to celebrate with him.

He meets her gaze, grins – suddenly he’s in her bedroom, she’s got ten different papers scattered across the bed – it’s a Friday night and Rajan is away on a business trip – _Rajan is away._  Perfect.

“Do you ever stop working?” he asks – yells, over the pounding baseline and the sounds of distant shouts.

She shakes her head.  “I noticed something strange in this one report, and I want to see if there could be a chemical explanation.  I’m not quite caught up on the literature, and –”

Wolfgang grabs her hands, pulls her up.  He’s a little unsteady on his feet, but the room isn’t quite spinning yet.  He notices – face suddenly close to hers, how did that happen – her hair is tied in a loose braid, her face is somewhat less shiny than usual.

She isn’t wearing makeup.  That’s what it is.  He likes that.  Makes her eyes look darker.

“What?” she asks.

Oh – he must’ve said that last thought aloud.  “Leave the papers alone,” he tells her.  “Dance with me.”

She turns towards the bed, he pulls on their joined hands – joined hands?  When did he grab her hands?

“Wolfgang,” she says, looking back at him.  Her eyes are so wide, so dark, he wants to drown in them.  And the way she says his name – _Wolfgang_ – as though it’s a secret – he could listen to that for years.  He loves her.   _He loves her._  Someday, he’ll know what to do about that, but right now, he can only sing it out with every goddamned beat of his goddamned heart.   _He loves her._

“Wolfgang, you’re drunk.”

“And you should be,” he answers sincerely.  “Come on.  It’s Friday night.  We’re celebrating.”

She looks at him.  For a moment, he thinks she’s going to push away – but then, she smiles.  She smiles.  This tiny wicked thing that sends a rush of heat straight to his gut.

“Alright,” she says.  “Just let me get some sturdier shoes.”

And he takes her dancing.  While she changes, he orders a round of vodka shots, then he watches in something like awe as she pounds back two in a row without grimacing.  She’s out on the dance floor almost before he can keep up, and he feels her worries, her fears, her duties fall away with the first shake of her hips.

Wolfgang has seen her dance before.  On their birthday, in his periphery.  (For a brief, painful moment – at her wedding.)  But has always been surrounded by the cluster, full of sensory overload, or too private for him to witness.  Now, he feels the freedom in her stomping feet, the joy in her raised arms, the weightlessness in her bright smile, and he takes pride in the knowledge that _he brought her here._

_(What he wouldn’t give, for her be this happy always.)_

He wonders if the world was built just for her to dance within it.  At this moment, that theory feels entirely plausible.

The knowledge bursts in his heart in time with the bass of the music – _he loves her, he loves her, he loves her._

She turns and grins at him, one hand outstretched.  “Come on,” she says.  “I thought you were celebrating.”

He lets her pull him in, lets her spin him around.  He lets himself _love._  Pretends that tonight, this weightlessness, this feeling of flying – is enough.

 

“When are you going to stop pining?”

One moment, Kala is sitting in her office, enjoying a quick lunch (picked up from her father’s restaurant on her way in that morning – she can and should be cooking for herself more, but it’s so hard to wean himself off his batata vada.)  And the next, she’s feeling the cold smooth surface of concrete, Sun sitting alone in the corner of the courtyard, watching the late-afternoon clouds float by.  She seems tired, or perhaps homesick – Kala can feel a bone weariness radiating from Sun like the soreness of muscles after a long day spent on her feet, but she can’t pinpoint the source of the feeling.  And she’s struck, not for the first time, by how much she admires Sun – by how much she goes through, every day, just to keep from punching the walls until her knuckles are bloody.

It occurs to Kala that Sun asked her a question.  “What?”

“When are you going to stop pining?” Sun repeats, more slowly this time, each syllable carefully articulated.

 _Pining?_  Kala glances around, confirms that she and Sun are the only two of their cluster here – she definitely isn’t talking to someone else.

“What?”

_“When are you –”_

“No, I heard you that time,” Kala explains.  “I’m just confused.”

“That’s the problem, isn’t it?” Sun says.  “You’re confused.  You’re always confused.  You made a decision and you’re still confused.  Will you ever _not_ be confused?”

Kala fights the urge to point out that this conversation isn’t exactly helping her be less confused – sees Sun roll her eyes as she catches that thought – then gasps aloud as she realizes.

“This is about Wolfgang.”

Sun nods.  “And here I thought you were supposed to be the smart one.”

“I’m not _pining,”_ Kala protests.  Pining is for high school girls crushing on boys two years above them, or heroines in Bollywood movies, or romance novel protagonists.  She is an _adult._  She is a _working professional_ with a _university degree in biochemistry._  She is not –

Sun raises an eyebrow, and with a practiced twist of her mind, Kala is diving into her memories.  Her face as she catches Wolfgang watching her from around a corner, just before he disappears.  Her hands during the cluster’s birthday celebration, pulling Wolfgang close then pushing him away.  Her eyes when he finds another girl actually capable of being with him.  And a thousand other tiny moments, a thousand other tiny pangs of _want_ strung along like links on a chain, so familiar she has ceased to notice them.

Gods.  She is pining.  And _how._

“We can all feel it,” Sun says.  “It’s exhausting and distracting.  I don’t need to be worrying _is Wolfgang moving on_ when I’m doing arm training.”

“Wait – all?” Kala asks.  “The whole cluster?”

Sun nods.  “They’re too polite to say anything about it.  But yes, the whole cluster.  Riley told me that Will had a dream last night of just you and Wolfgang staring at each other for half an hour.”

Kala feels her face flush, like a Bunsen burner turned on full heat.  She had that dream.  She’d forgotten until now, but… oh, Ganesha.

“Do you think _he_ can feel it?” she asks.

Sun just looks at her.

Of course he can feel it.  And just like that, Kala is standing in an apartment in Berlin, watching Wolfgang shave in preparation for a shift at the key shop.  It’s an action so mundane, so rudimentary, but she finds her gaze tracing his cheekbones, his jaw – what would it feel like to kiss him right there, at his pulse point –

His eyes meet hers in the mirror.  He turns, and she feels that same prick – that same _want._  As though they are two echoes of the same tolling bell.

She pushes herself back to Korea, out of self-defense more than anything else.  She’s pining.  He’s pining.  How did she let this happen?

“See?” Sun asks.  She’s now holding a cigarette – Kala hears distant music, electronic and slow, and knows that Riley has been here in her absence.  “It’s like watching one of those overly drawn out romantic dramas, except I have to feel everything you’re feeling.”

“And what do you expect me to do about it?” Kala demands, suddenly angry.  The question is pointless.  She knows what Sun wants – what all of them want.  Consummation, vindication, abdication.  Pushing off from her sheltered world and into a thunderstorm.

“I’m not leaving my husband,” she says.

Sun shrugs.  “Fine.  Don’t leave your husband.  But you can’t stay stuck in this limbo forever.  You’re suffocating him, and both of you are suffocating the rest of us.”

She finishes her cigarette, flicks the ashes into the shadows, and hands the butt to Kala.  “Throw this out for me, would you?”

One more heartbeat, and Sun is gone.  Kala is back in her office.  Her shaking fingers grip a cigarette butt, a tiny fire still glowing at its tip.

“I’m not leaving my husband,” she repeats.

She wants so badly to believe that.

 

_You have something good and beautiful hidden inside you, just as I have something dark and wicked inside of me._

_We’re perfect for each other._

_No._

_Why?_

_Because we have to change.  Become better people._

_What if I don’t want to change?_


	3. part iii

**_iii. the entropy of an isolated system always increases._ **

 

_The best times, and the worst, are those times when the whole cluster gathers together.  When they are so wrapped in each other’s emotions – eight people in seven countries feeling the warmth of the afternoon sun on their backs – that he forgets not to reach out – not to his arm around her shoulders – not to ask her to dance.  He forgets that she is not his.  He only looks at her and hears her heart beating in time with his, like two echoes of the same tolling bell._

 

Lila Facchini is precisely Wolfgang’s type.

When she first appears on Fuchs’ couch, all long legs and silver high heels, he feels as though he’s been dropped into an old porn movie.  She’s strong, she’s sexy, she’s confident.  She has the body of a Bond girl and the smile of a piranha.  She knows exactly how to tear Wolfgang apart from the moment their eyes meet, and he feels her bite into his mind, smooth his edges, center his circles of pleasure like a general sizing up an enemy’s weak points to prepare for an attack.

She could not be more precisely Wolfgang’s type if someone had sketched her from his teenage jerk-off fantasies.  And yet he does not want her.

The scale of this statement is not quite evident until she has him pressed up against her, simultaneously eating lunch and holding her waist like a loaded gun aching to fire.  He can feel the want racing through Lila pure as diamonds – what a pleasant surprise this is, to find another sensate in Berlin’s inner circle, to find a new plaything so perfectly appealing, to find a person who may be able to understand her – yet all he can think is how much he would rather be on a rooftop in Mumbai.

There is something tragic about this, Wolfgang thinks.  A beautiful woman is on her knees for him, and he does not want her.  He’ll play along, he’ll push against her, he’ll play at this scandal in plain sight, but the fire he feels is… mundane.  Transitory.  Unimportant.

 _Playing,_ Lila calls this.  A game of tongues and hips, heat and motion.  She draws him in, and he lets her – only so that he can ask questions.   _How can I feel you touching me if I’m not touching myself?_   _Does it feel this real because we’re so close?_  He is sitting at a table discussing global finance, and he is _playing_ with a beautiful woman, and he is picturing a lab bench in Mumbai – chemicals neatly alphabetized, glassware perfectly polished, a red notebook with a list of questions hiding in the desk’s top drawer.

He wonders what questions _she_ would ask, if she were here.  The selfish part of him hopes not all of them would be scientific.

He turns his head and for a moment he can almost see her – strolling through the market, picking out the perfect tomatoes, determined to try cooking tonight.  If he wished hard enough, could Kala be sitting at this dining room table instead?  She’s not afraid of Wolfgang, she’s tried marriage, she still doesn’t love the guy – if he wished hard enough, could he convince her to try something _real?_

“Wolfgang,” Lila says, her whisper dripping down his spine like oil rising through water.  “Where are you?”

He does not answer.

 

Kala is tired of holding herself back.

She’s standing in this art gallery, smiling and nodding at Rajan’s friends as though she understands their remarks about finance and policy, and she suddenly cannot remember why she agreed to this marriage.  To give herself a comfortable life?  To make her family proud?  Something like that.  Yet would her father be proud of her now, if he saw her smiling and nodding – hair straightened makeup impeccable voice quiet – reduced from the loud little girl who kept asking questions until her teachers ran out of answers to a woman who cannot get through a single conversation with her husband without feeling talked down to.

Rajan plies her with promotions and jewelry and smart-sounding conversation, he pretends to value her powerful mind, but really, she is no more worthwhile to him (or to any of these people) than the art in this gallery.   _I don’t understand it,_ she tells Ajay.   _You don’t need to,_ he replies in not so many words.   _You only need to admire it._

 _My beautiful bride,_ Rajan always calls her.  Not my _brilliant_ bride.  My _beautiful_ bride.  And he carries out a conversation with this work associate as though it doesn’t matter that she is standing there, unable to contribute an opinion.

She runs to the bathroom, more as an escape than anything, and – and Wolfgang is there.

Wolfgang is there.  Their eyes meet, and she feels all her fears, her uncertainties, her desire to _escape_ flow out of herself into him, like a river running towards the sea.  Where Rajan is a stone fortress, always brushing off concerns and keeping secrets, Wolfgang is the open ocean, unable to hide anything from her – and part of this must be their sensate connection, but most of it is the way that he opens himself so honestly, lets her peel back his layers until she can see his glowing core, his desires to understand the world and remain loyal to those he loves running parallel to hers – _the only person I ever felt I could say anything to._  In this moment, at the bathroom of an art gallery in Mumbai and his favorite club in Berlin, she wants him more than she has ever wanted anyone.  And yet she feels him pulling away from her, even as his heart is ripped in two to do it.

 _Why is it like this?_ He punches the wall in frustration.  Enough frustration for both of them.

 _You deserve to be happy,_ he says.

 _Is_ she happy?

Halfway across the world, Sun is practicing tai chi on a rooftop to celebrate the rising of the sun.  She raises her arms, feels the energy of the earth flow through her, embraces her connection to the circle of life.   _She_ is happy.  Kala can feel Sun’s happiness glowing just outside her consciousness, like a beautiful dream that she needs only to close her eyes and step into.  Kala… Kala _should_ be happy.  She has all the trappings of happiness – a good job, a beautiful home, a loving family, a husband who provides for her – but she is left this gaping hole in her chest, a whirlpool that no shopping bags or kind words can ever fill.  If she were truly _happy_ , whatever that means, would she still _want_ whenever her eyes meet his?  Would she still have this urge to dive and dive and never come up for air?

Something is telling her that, no, she would not.

She has tried happiness, or something like it, and it has left her this quiet, docile shell.  She is ready to try something else.

And she is halfway to getting that _something else_ when the door opens – the women burst in – he disappears.  But she does not give up so easily.

 

_She’s here, isn’t she, Lila says, in the bathroom of his favorite club.  You want her.  And Wolfgang does not correct her._

_(He has always been a terrible liar.)_

 

“They took my temple,” she says.

Wolfgang is sitting at the café (the same café she visited once, what feels like a lifetime ago), enjoying a long lunch break, when Kala appears in the seat beside him.  She doesn’t meet his gaze when he looks at her – she’s staring ahead at something in the distance, shaking.

He blinks, and he’s next to her on the sofa of her apartment.  The TV is playing, stuck on some news channel – RIOT AT THE TEMPLE OF GANESHA – EXTREMISTS PROTEST TO RELEASE GURU YASH FROM PRISON – WIFE AND DAUGHTER-IN-LAW OF MANENDRA RASAL ESCORTED OUT BY POLICE.  For a moment, Kala’s face flashes across the screen, wearing the same wild-eyed terror he sees painted across her features now.

He’d felt her panic – was tugged out of the shop into Bombay, then Nairobi, then a tiny houseboat in San Francisco – but hadn’t known what he could do besides take over and start punching people, which she would have hated him for later – so he had stayed away.  He isn’t sure what he can do _now,_ to be honest.  But she came to him, which must mean something.

“You shouldn’t be watching that,” he says.

She shakes her head – once, twice, five times.  “I need to know.  I need to know what they’re saying about it.”

“And what are they saying about it?” he asks.

“That it’s an act of extremism, unjustifiable violence – which it _is,_ violence is never –”  She glances at him, revises – “violence is so _rarely_ justifiable.  But this… this was because of a bill restricting use of the temple.  A place where so many people go to pray, to talk through difficult decisions, to feel connected to their families and their culture.  If I were them, I would be angry, too.  I _am_ angry.  I was only protected by the police because of who I married.”

“They took your temple,” Wolfgang repeats.

Kala nods – still shaking, still staring ahead.  Wolfgang reaches out for a remote, sitting on the table in front of her, and switches the TV off, then places his arm slowly around her shoulders.  She leans back against him – and he hates the way her touch sends his heart racing even now – but her shaking has slowed.

“I feel like I should do something,” she says.  “Talk to Rajan.  Talk to his father.  Convince them to release Guru Yash, or compromise, or _something._  But Rajan never listens to me, and his father never wanted us to get married in the first place.  All I can do is what they tell me to.  And I hate it!  I hate it.”

Wolfgang nods.  Hates it with her.  (Both men are idiots for not asking Kala’s opinion in the first place, but he doesn’t say that.)

“And you know what else?” Kala goes on.  “This is selfish of me, but –”

“You’re allowed to be selfish,” Wolfgang tells her.

She stops – looks at him – really _looks_ at him, for the first time – and he feels a rush of _the one person I can really talk to_ and _something better than happiness_ and for a moment every cell in his body is screaming at him to close that distance between them –

But he turns away.  Closes his eyes.  She needs to talk, and he needs to let her.

“That temple was the place I always went when I felt scared or confused,” Kala says, more quietly than before.  “My house was always so crowded, it felt hard to think there.  When I needed to hear my own voice, I went to talk to Ganesha.  And now, I have my own home, but it never really feels like _mine_ , like something I earned.  At work, people are always expecting me to be _Mrs. Rasal,_ always on his side.  And now, I can’t go back to the temple – it’s tainted with violence and hatred.  So where do I go?  How do I remind myself… who I am, behind _Mrs. Rasal, loyal wife_ and _Kala, loyal daughter?”_

“You can go to me,” Wolfgang replies.

She looks at him.  Time stands still.

“I mean, that’s what you’re doing now, isn’t it?” he asks.  “I’m no elephant-headed god, but I’ll listen to you.”

She looks at him for another moment – he’s almost afraid he said the wrong thing – and then suddenly shifts, pulling him into an embrace.  She is warm in his arms like a spot of sun-drenched water in an outdoor pool, and he can smell oranges and hydrochloric acid as though she really is there beside him.

“Thank you,” she whispers.

And, God, his heart is pounding.  He’s surprised she can’t hear it – pounding out _I love you, I love you, I love you._

When she pulls back, he takes out his cellphone and calls Felix.

“I’m not feeling too great,” he says.  “Think I’m gonna take the afternoon off.”  And he goes back to his apartment, sits with her in Berlin and Bombay while she shows him her favorite Bollywood movies.

He has to admit, the dancing is pretty impressive.

 

 _Few children in the world ever smiled as easily as my daughter did,_ her father says.

_What happened to that girl?_

Kala knows the answer, even as she voices the question.  That girl grew up.  That girl went to university for biochemistry even though she could have gone on to take over her father’s restaurant as her family had wanted.  That girl took her family’s entire savings in four short years and prepared herself to spend a lifetime paying it back.  That girl got married.

That girl got married.

Back in her apartment that night, Rajan out late at some important meeting, Kala takes out a notebook and lays out the facts, as she understands them.

Ten months ago, she married Rajan Rasal.  At the time, her reasons for accepting his proposal were as follows:

1\. His proposal made her parents happy.  They were thrilled at her prospects for upward class mobility, financial stability, and a lavish home in which she could raise children who would never want for anything.

2\. Kala owes her education, her job, and all that has come with it (including Rajan’s proposal) to her parents.  Although they have never asked her to repay them for her university degree, she feels as though it is her duty to them to use that degree to hold down a well-paying job and provide stability to her children.  Marrying Rajan made those things possible.

3\. Since the marriage, Kala has become distinctly unhappy.  She likes her job, her home, the clothes she wears, the food she eats… all of the material pieces of her life are perfectly in place, like a five hundred-piece jigsaw puzzle pieced together just so.  But there is an emptiness inside of her that no material object can fill, and she aches to pick her jigsaw puzzle life up and dash it to pieces on the floor.

4\. Since the marriage, Kala’s parents have become less happy with it than she originally thought they were.  Her father clashes with Manendra over dinner.  Her mother tells stories of how lost and alone she felt in the first months of her marriage.  Her sister keeps talking about how different home feels, now that Kala isn’t there.  Last week, when she went out to lunch with one of her younger cousins, the girl barely even recognized Kala – _you just look so different, with the fancy clothes and the straightened hair and the makeup,_ she said.

5\. Wolfgang is a catalyst.  Whenever Kala sees him, her slow-burning satisfaction boils over until all she wants to do is run.  Something about his presence causes rules and duty to shrink, barely noticeable, barely important.  And it’s ridiculous – what kind of life would she have with him?  working in a key shop, braving the cold of Berlin? – but it’s tempting in a way that completely defies logic.

Kala reads through her list, then grimaces at its lack of clear confusions, crumples it up, and tosses it towards her trash can.  She lies back on her bed and closes her eyes.

Theoretically, she has everything she could want.  But once a person has achieved their dream life - dream house, dream home, dream husband – what is there to fight for next?  Does she throw herself into the progress of Rasal Pharmaceuticals, a business she believes in less with every comptroller general report she reads?  Does she lie back and start making babies?

Or does she throw this perfection out the window and step into a fantasy?

Her father might forgive her, if she left.  But can she leave now, without causing a mess more staining than the one she is leaving – without branding herself as that girl who had everything and threw it away for nothing – without sinking her family in caste and future?  Maybe she can.  Maybe it would be worth it.

But is she brave enough to try?

 

_As adults, we learn to carefully open all the rest of the presents.  We are taught to smile, and to pretend that all are equally important to us.  But our heart always knows the truth._

 

Eight souls enter a bar in Mexico City.  Eight throats down a shot of tequila.  Eight soldiers leave ready for war.

 _Nothing changes if we keep playing it safe,_ Will says.  He is tired of running and hiding, tired of playing defense, and his rush of courage sweeps the rest of the cluster up and carries them like a breaking wave.  Even Kala – so careful, so logical, desperate to understand the potential consequences before each move – is persuaded to take the risk, to forget _change one variable_ and _experimental control_ and _multiple trials_ and just leap.

(She looks in the mirror and does not hate her own appearance for the first time in months.)

 _Fear never fixed anything,_ Wolfgang says.  They asked for his opinion last, because they will value it most.  (If the man who gunned down one of the four kings of Berlin for petty vengeance says a risk is too great, then that risk is too great.)  But he does not shoot down the plan.  This rally, Riley’s show, is not too great a risk.  If the decision were only his, they would have done this months ago.

Riley takes the stage.  She looks otherworldly in the bright blue light – like a nymph, or a fairy queen.  Wolfgang watches as the rest of the cluster steps in around him, eyes wide with wonder.  Kala is trying to take in every detail, probably so that she can document this in one of her notebooks later.  (The only details Wolfgang cares about are the shape of her smile, and the shade of red in her dress.)

 _When we’re together, there is nothing that we can’t do,_ Riley says.

The light changes, and he looks at her.

It’s that song – the song he sang with her once in a dream.  She looks at him, and he can feel her remembering – strange yet familiar, eyes full of loneliness and full of wonder.  Standing on a rooftop and standing in a karaoke bar.  The world spinning and growing soft.

So much has changed since that night, and nothing has changed at all.  He would still dive into the ocean for her, but now he thinks that he would also learn to swim.

The song swirls around them, familiar and powerful.  He draws her closer, tells her to take that risk – tells her he knows she’s scared, but the risk is worth it.  He would give her all his courage just for her to take one step.

And she is halfway to taking it when the cops show up.

 

_Fear never fixed anything._

 

_What are you doing?_

_Looking for courage._

 

Kala awakes, and she wants.

Somewhere, several time zones away, Capheus is about to have sex.  She feels the rush in his veins, the spread of heat to his gut, the quick staccato of his heart as plainly as though they are her own.  And then, suddenly, they _are_ her own.

 _Fear never fixed anything,_ Wolfgang said.  And so she goes to the pool – she goes to wash away her fear – she goes to look for courage – she goes to him.

_(He told her once that she is allowed to be selfish.)_

She dives beneath the water, and she stands in his bedroom.  There is no more distance between the two places than there is between her mind and his.  She goes to him, and rules and duty sink away – or she summoned him because she wants to live free of rules and duty.  Or she summoned him only because she _wants._

She asked him, once, why he likes to swim naked.  He told her that swimming makes him completely honest – in the water, there is nowhere to hide.  There is nowhere to hide now, for her.  She wears her desires plain on her chest, red as the nightdress now sticking to her skin.

She allows her gaze to trace the angles of his cheekbones, his chest, his calves.  He stares straight into her eyes.  He is wondering if he is dreaming (and a strange heat fills her belly, at the thought of him dreaming of her), then deciding that, no, this is too strong a feeling to be mere dream.  He has not had sex in months, because whenever he tried, he thought of her.

She knew this, somehow in the back of her mind, but now the force of his want is like a planet or an ocean, pulling her with incalculable gravity.

It takes all of her self-control not to run to his bed – to wait for him to come to her.

_A few hours ago, just after the rave, Kala appeared on Nomi’s desk._

_“Are asexual people allowed to want sex, sometimes?” she demanded._

_“Oh, honey,” Nomi replied.  “You’re allowed to want whatever you want.”_

_“But doesn’t it go against the definition?”_

_At that, Nomi smiled.  “Definitions aren’t hard and fast things.  Not when they’re about people.  They can always be expanded.”_

Kala feels herself expanding now.  Her desires reach out to Wolfgang, filling the space between them like a bowl of water spilled on a tile floor.

She waits for him to come to her.  She takes a breath and dives deeper.

_Are you sure you want this?_

Yes.  I want you.

And he bends down towards her – and she leans up to meet him – and the space between them shrinks shrinks shrinks until she is no longer certain where her body ends and his begins.  He is trailing kisses down her neck, and she is tracing fingers down his chest, and he is hoisting her legs around his waist, and she is leaning back in the water.

 _Thank God for gravity,_ he once said.  This feels like gravity and simultaneously the lifting of gravity, rules and laws and duties all dissolving into the clear water around her.  This feels something like flying.

Kala is no virgin anymore.  She knows how to kiss with an open mouth, how to take a man apart with her fingers, how to open her legs and prepare herself for entry.  When she was bored with Rajan, in the endless minutes it often seemed to take him to finish, she would take mental notes.  Extensive data files grew in the back of her mind, on good moves and bad, when to ask permission and when to give it.  Mechanistically, she understands how sex works – in the same way that mechanistically, she understands how combustion works.

But emotionally, mentally, she has never completely understood until now.  Now, her entire body is on fire, nerve endings magnified as he kisses her breasts, her waist, the insides of her thighs – as he worships in her in a way that Rajan has but so completely unlike how Rajan has.  She can feel every cell of her skin arching towards him.

_All the rules and the logic of everyday life, things that were so important to me, all go away.  And all I  feel is how fast my heart beats whenever I’m with you._

In a bedroom in Nairobi, Capheus is showing a brilliant woman how much he admires her.  In an apartment in San Francisco, Nomi is kissing her girlfriend awake.  In her teacher’s spare room in Seoul, Sun is sliding her fingers beneath her loose pants.

And in a bedroom in Berlin, Wolfgang is showing Kala what sex can be.  Not boring, not routine, not an hour for her to run through the Periodic Table in her head, but a celebration of life.  She can feel what he is feeling – how much he wishes he could give her the world, how he wants her happiness more than anything, how, were she a goddess, he would sacrifice at her altar.

_From the moment I first saw you, I wanted you._

She felt the same then.  She feels the same now.  she wonders for a moment what might have happened if she had taken him up on his invitation then, the morning after her almost-wedding – would she still have followed through with her marriage to Rajan?  Or would she be in his apartment now, really in his apartment –

He feels her running through what if scenarios and looks up – meets her gaze.  An unspoken question in his eyes.

She nods.

One finger.  Two fingers.  Three.  And he is inside her, and she is expanding around him.

This should be simple thermodynamics – the same two parts of the body moving together in the same way should elicit the same feeling.  But what with Rajan was a slightly uncomfortable, slightly painful intrusion is with Wolfgang like stepping into a monsoon – feeling the sky open upon her, washing away her worries and her fears until she is only a collection of molecules dancing with joy.  She remembers, through a haze, a line from the Bhagavad Gita – _I am become death, destroyer of worlds_ – he is destroying her world and building it back up anew from nothing.

At some point, she stops thinking – _stops thinking_ – and just _moves._  Moves around him, moves beneath him, moves with him.  Their bodies are as connected as their minds.

He finishes at the same time as she does – Gods, she thought that was a myth from romance novels – and she sees stars. _Stars._

Wolfgang pulls out slowly, carefully.  He steps into his bathroom and returns with a washcloth – wipes down his own sheets and somehow also hers – then collapses into bed beside her.

“It’s not that good with Rajan, is it,” he says.

She glares at him (or, well, she tries to – she doesn’t have the energy to feel anything other than tired and satisfied) – and he grins.

He’s right.  It’s not that good with Rajan.  In the morning, she will map out and analyze this turn of events.  But right now, she slips into his arms and falls asleep, her heart beating in time with his.

 

 _Last night was a dream come true,_ _Rajan says._

_Wolfgang doesn’t tell him just how accurate that statement is._

_He wakes up with her in his arms, and for three seconds – three blissful seconds – allows himself to hope._

 

Kala is afraid of her want.

He can feel it the moment she steps onto the football field – waves of want rolling over her, threatening to push her overboard – and at the same time a dam building up from the scant centimeters of solid ground she can claim as her own, trying to push the water away.  She’s fighting a losing battle, he knows.  She gave in once, and she will give in again.

 _Last night was not a fantasy._  No – if it were a fantasy, she would not be shattering it the next morning.

He can no more _help her_ get rid of her desire than she can throw away her life and jump on the next plane to Berlin.  If rules and logic sink away when they are together, then rules and logic resurface in full force when they are apart, and Wolfgang is not equipped to compete with an entire world.

He cannot compete with an entire world – but he can show her the cracks and hope she pounds nails through them, he can point out the clouds and hope she lets the rain through.  She’s not happy, he knows she’s not – she’s not happy with her expensive necklaces and her penthouse apartment and her secretary – and she doesn’t need to throw it all away, but she needs to change something.  At the very least, she needs to let him come to her.

 _The one person I ever felt I could say anything to._  Or perhaps – _the one person I ever felt truly happy with._

Showing her the cracks, letting him visit – these are strategies that Wolfgang needs to develop, needs to expand, needs to work through slowly.  He wants to campaign for her happiness as thoroughly and chivalrously as Rajan campaigned for her hand in marriage.

And right now, he knows, he is failing.  He’s saying the wrong things, making the wrong analogies, trying to have her any way he can – the clear win-lose competition of football clouding his judgment, or maybe just _her_ clouding his judgment, her in her pink blouse and her bright lipstick and her searching dark eyes –

She gave in once.  He gives in every time he looks at her – gives a little more each day.  Soon, she will have his whole heart.  And, God, that terrifies him more than losing her.

 

She keeps summoning him by accident.

One moment she’s at her desk looking over reports, and the next he’s kneeling beneath her, offering to open her with his tongue, right here in her office.  One moment she’s walking home from work, passing an empty alley, and the next he’s pressing her up against that stone wall, one nod away from hoisting her legs to his waist.  One moment she’s in bed with Rajan, his head between her breasts, and the next she’s hearing his voice in her ear – _I could do that better._

A dam has been broken.  Some reservoir of pressure that Kala didn’t realize she was holding closed finally burst, and now she’s gone from drought to monsoon season all at once.  She can’t close her eyes without picturing his smile the first time he made her come, sky-blue eyes glinting with something like lightning.

She’s ruined four pairs of underwear in the past week alone.

At first, she wonders if she’s been possessed by a demon, as punishment for cheating on her husband.  But then, she remembers a conversation in her bedroom, what feels like a lifetime ago – she called him a demon, and he laughed at her.  Told her in not so many words that he was only human, and so was she.

_You don’t know what I want._

_Don’t I?_

One evening standing in the shower, Rajan out late and the apartment to herself, Kala slips a hand down towards her vagina.  She pushes in one curious finger, slicked with warm water.  The feeling is intrusive, slightly uncomfortable, as it was the last time she tried this.  But she wants to understand – she _needs to understand_ – she pushes the finger deeper inside, works it slowly back and forth until she finds what she thinks is her clit.

She closes her eyes, and imagines the finger replaced by one slightly longer, more calloused – then imagines that finger replaced by a mouth.  Heat pools in her gut, rising like a high pressure system ready to release a storm.

She opens her eyes, and Wolfgang is standing in front of her, black shirt leather jacket golden hair completely soaked by the pounding water of the shower.  He meets her gaze and she knows that he would drop to his knees in a heartbeat if she asked.

Kala shakes her head.  She needs to do this for herself.

He pulls away – she gets a glimpse of Felix leaning back against the couch in Wolfgang’s apartment, a half-empty six-pack of beer open between them – and she takes a steadying breath.

In, out.  In, out.

It takes a long time, longer than Kala had expected.  She tries different rhythms, different numbers of fingers, different positions – _all research is trial and error_ – then settles on leaning back against the wall of the shower, two fingers, running in slow circles.  She tries not to picture him, but in the end it is impossible to banish him entirely – memories of his hands and his mouth come as naturally as breathing.  After she finally climaxes, gasping through the still-running water, she sinks down and sits back against the tile for what feels like hours, her mind blissfully blank.

When she gets out, she wraps herself in a towel, sits down cross-legged on her bed, and takes out a notebook.  Turns to a blank page.  Stares at the pale blue lines, daring her to write.

 _I am asexual,_ she writes on the first line.

 _I want Wolfgang,_ she writes on the second.

These two statements must fit together somehow – both are true, she has empirical evidence and experimental results.  But how does she reconcile one with the other?

The purpose of sexual reproduction is to propagate a species.  She and Wolfgang are the same species, so from an evolutionary perspective, it is logical for her to want him, but not Rajan or other sapiens.  But then, why does Kala not want Capheus, or Nomi, or Sun?  She can feel their desire through their connection, she can engage in something like sex with them, but those feelings are not her own – not in the way that her desire for Wolfgang is enough to bring him to her.

Yes, she finds him attractive – blue eyes sharp smile fingers that can take anything apart – but that cannot be enough, either.  Kala has spent her life not _wanting,_ and now one person can drive her desire in a way that no other has.

What makes him so special?

(She can feel him laughing at the edge of her consciousness at these questions, at the thought that he is one in seven billion.  She shoves him out.  He’s been distracting enough already.)

 _You’re allowed to want whatever you want,_ Nomi said.  And Kala knows that – her feelings need no permission – but she hates not understanding _why._  It feels as though she just resigned herself to not getting why the human race is so obsessed with sex, and she now thinks she’s solved that equation (the rush of pleasure, the all-encompassing need), but she doesn’t get why _now._  Why _him._  

Why was she given a sensate connection to a man who may be the only person in the world with whom she actually wants to have sex?

Kala hears a door slam – Rajan is home – and tears the paper to shreds, throws on her pajamas before he can suspect anything.  But the questions linger – why now?  Why him?  What lesson are the gods trying to teach her?

And should she give in?

 

“Felix, have you ever been in love?”

It’s coming on three o’clock in the morning, and the lights of Berlin are fuzzy as childhood memories.  Wolfgang leans back on the bench overlooking the river, passes the last bottle of beer to his brother.  A breeze races past, carrying early summer chill and the sounds of distant parties.

The lights of Berlin are fuzzy.  Wolfgang has been here before – to this bench, to this time, to this feeling – the moment between drunk and lonely when the world stops spinning and begins to sink.  He remembers another bench – maybe this one, maybe another one just like it – several months ago, snow in her hair and laughter in her voice.

_We’re perfect for each other.  No.  We have to change._

“You know I have,” Felix says.  His head is heavy against Wolfgang’s shoulder – he’s still spinning, still dancing that familiar dance of vodka and lights and heavy bassline.  He probably could’ve gotten laid tonight, if Wolfgang hadn’t pulled him out, pulled him to this bench.

“You know I fall in love all the damn time, Wolfie,” Felix says.  “There was that girl, just last week – with the, the curly hair and the purple jeans – and I think there was a guy at the club tonight, tall and broad like a knight in a movie – and you know I’ll never really get over Nyssa, and –”

“I know,” Wolfgang tells him.  Felix falls in love every week, and Wolfgang used to say it was his fatal flaw, but now he envies it.  “But I’m not talking about that.  Not falling in love.”

“Then what are you talking about?”

“Being there.  Falling too far and getting stuck.”

Felix lifts his head – Wolfgang watches as his world stops spinning and begins to sink.

“Does this have anything to do with the fact that you haven’t gotten laid in months?”

Wolfgang goes very still.  And Felix laughs – something between a snort and a cackle – sending beer sloshing out of the bottle and onto Wolfgang’s shirt.

“I fucking knew it!” he crows.  “Knew something was up when you didn’t fuck Lila.  Or before that – New Year’s?  Was it New Year’s?  I don’t know.  Don’t know why you’ve been holding out so damn long, Wolfie.  Who _is_ this girl?  Why haven’t I met her yet?”

“You haven’t answered my question,” Wolfgang replies.

“Your – yeah, okay.”  Felix takes a swig of beer, maneuvers himself into a moderately more upright position.  “The answer is yeah, I have.  With Nyssa, you know.  God, was she gorgeous.  And smart!  So fucking smart!  Can’t believe she just up and moved to Estonia, man.”

Wolfgang remembers Nyssa – the shape of her grin, when she made a joke, and the way Felix’s eyes always followed her, like a planet pulled towards the sun.

“Being in love is like… it’s like getting drunk,” Felix says.  “Like, you could go your whole life without doing it, and you’d be fine, you’d be perfectly happy, but once it hits you, it’s just like, fuck.  Everything’s different.  The world is a whole new place.  You never want to go back.”

“Does being in love make you puke, too?” Wolfgang asks.

Felix considers this – polishes off the beer, in the meanwhile – then nods, sagely.  “It makes you puke – but not food or beer or whatever.  You puke, like, words.  Money.  Feelings.  It’s all over the place, man.  It’s so hard to clean up.  Shit, this is such a good – what do you call it, that poetry thing –”

“An analogy,” Wolfgang supplies.

“Yeah.  That’s it.  I should be a poet!  Wolfie!”

Wolfgang shakes his head.  “You’d be a terrible poet.”

“You don’t know that!  I could do – I could do slams, and shit!  I can talk – really – slowly.  I can be weird.  I can do all of that.”  Felix drops the pitch of his voice to a low growl.   _“What… is… best… in… life?”_

Wolfgang throws his arm around Felix, pulls him in a little too tight, just to shut him up.  It’s only a temporary fix, though, because not thirty seconds later Felix is composing a truly awful poem about beer.

 

 _The next morning, Felix ambushes Wolfgang with a cup of coffee and a question: have_ you _ever been in love?_

_Wolfgang sighs and begins to talk.  (He’s always been a terrible liar.)_

 

Kala asks the others for advice.

They are all connected to her, they all understand her questions and her confusion.  (She remembers Sun staring at her evenly, telling her to _stop pining_ , and winces at how much unnecessary turmoil she must be throwing the others into.)  She feels guilty for troubling them with problems that are inconsequential compared to their life-and-death struggles, but then, there is little else she can do to figure this out – she’s made charts and graphs of every kind, looked at the problems from every angle she can think of, and is still no closer to an answer.

(It doesn’t help that the more power she gains in Rasal Pharmaceuticals, the less she believes in the company – the less she believes in the security that she married for.   _You are my life,_ he tells her, and she wonders how to tell him that he is not hers.)

This strategy, asking for six new opinions, is like asking six new parts of herself to come at her questions from the outside in.  In this situation, it’s the closest she could come to a literature review.

She talks to Will first.  With him, she phrases her problem as one of trust – does she confess her sins to Rajan in the hopes that he will confess his?  Is it possible to regain trust in a relationship that has been built on lies from the start?

Will is quiet – listening, watching, tiptoeing through her memories as she tests his vitals – until she asks him to speak.  And he turns her questions on their head in the way that only a cop could.

_Do you want to tell him everything in order to make him tell you everything?  Or do you want to tell him because you’re in love with someone else?_

Kala is still considering that question when she goes to Nomi – who asks her to wait while she finishes an important piece of hacking, then sighs after a few minutes and confesses that it was actually a game of online Solitaire, and she lost.  Kala can’t help laughing at that (which, she realizes hours later, was probably why Nomi did it).

“If I were you, I would have been on a plane to Berlin months ago,” Nomi tells her.  “But I’m not you – you have this sense of duty that I’ve never had.  It impresses me, honestly, the lengths that you go to for your family.”

Kala looks down at that, fiddles with the ring on her finger.  Doesn’t say that she feels as though she has two families now, and staying loyal to one always seems to mean betraying the other.

“You’re afraid of losing them, if you tell the truth,” Nomi says.  “I get that.  I’ve been there.  But you know – if they don’t support you in being true to yourself and living a life that will make you happy, they weren’t worthy of your loyalty in the first place.”

Capheus comes to her before she can go to him, invites her to sit down next to him on the couch where he is watching a Van Damme movie on mute so as not to wake his mother.

“I hear you’re looking for advice,” he says.

Kala nods.  She watches the men on the TV – so caught up in their violence and their hatred, they never consider a grander solution.  She wonders if her cluster’s struggle with BPO would look the same way if it were restricted into a screen like this.

“I say, talk to Rajan first,” Capheus tells her.  “Some of his actions may be bad, but he cares about you.  He deserves to know the truth about your life, even if he does not tell you the full truth about his.  And you should ask him questions, let him explain as much as he can.”

“What about my family?” Kala asks.

“They will love you no matter what you decide,” he replies without hesitation.  “Both that family and this one.  And you know, if you ever need courage – I am here.”

Kala gives him a hug before she goes.

Riley is sitting on a park bench in Chicago, eating a pretzel – Kala can taste the salt like a memory, senses Will’s presence fading out as she arrives.

Kala begins spilling her heart without preamble.  She explains her worries over truth, demons, sexuality – _why him_ and _why now_ and _what lessons._

“You know, I spent a long time scared of taking chances,” Riley says, when Kala is done.  “I didn’t want to get too attached to anyone or anything, because I was afraid of what might happen when that was inevitably ripped away.  But now, I think that every chance, every open door, is just the universe giving us an opportunity.  And you can stop to question it, or you can resist it, but the option that makes life feel worth living is always taking the leap.”

Kala sits quietly – watches people move through the park, an old woman walking her dog and a young father carrying his daughter on his shoulders – and does not answer.

“Hey,” Riley says.  She nudges Kala with the side of her pretzel.  “Want a bite?”

The taste of salt is lingering in Kala’s mouth when she goes to Lito.  He’s draped across his bed in a strange blue garment she suddenly knows is called a _onesie_ , an empty tub of ice cream sitting beside him.

“Why would you want advice from _me?”_ he whines before Kala has the chance to say anything.  “I’m a failure!  A fraud!  A career-less failing fraud!”

“Um, I can come back another time –” Kala starts.

“No, no, this is good,” Lito corrects her.  He rolls over on his bed until he’s lying on his back, arms folded behind his bed, and motions for her to join him.  “You’re distracting me from how over my life is.”

She sits gingerly, careful not to disturb the ice cream tub.  “I’m guessing you know what I need advice on,” she says.

Lito glances at her, his expression clearly stating _no shit._  “You could say I’m a bad example for you.  I threw my life away for love, and look where it got me.”

“But you knew that this would happen when you did it,” Kala says.  “And you still made this choice.”

Lito looks at her – and for a moment she is dropped into a memory, she sees the look on Hernando’s face when he realized what Lito had thrown away for love.

“And I would do it again,” he says softly.

Kala stands up and goes to leave – she should have known this was what he would say – but before she can quite phase out, he stops her.

“Wolfgang told me something once,” he says.  “When you make a mistake, you’ve got two choices: you learn to live with it, or you fix it.”

“And my marriage to Rajan was a mistake,” Kala realizes.

Lito shrugs.  “You said it, not me.”

She goes to Sun last.  Tells herself this is because Sun has the most problems of her own right now, but really, it’s because Sun has always frightened Kala a little – her courage, her conviction, her power.

“I haven’t stopped pining,” she confesses.

Sun almost smiles at that.  “I know.  And I’m sorry.”

Kala takes a step back at that, wondering if Sun has somehow been replaced with one of the others without her noticing.

“I am,” Sun says.  “I should not have rushed your decision.  You’re a thorough person, and a careful one.  We need you to be that person, for the whole cluster.  So, take your time.  Do what you need to do.  The world won’t end if you pine for another week.”

Kala is so surprised by that response, she nearly sends herself back to Mumbai right then.  But she feels Sun laughing at her shock, and indignation at that amusement pulls her back in.

“But let me ask you one question,” Sun goes on.  “When was the last time you did something selfish?”

Kala feels her face flush – both of them know the answer.

 

The night Wolfgang has agreed to meet Lila for dinner, he walks through seven worlds.

It’s funny – he remembers something like this happening, when he went to the Holocaust memorial to decide whether or not he should go after Steiner.  He remembers seeing seven faces, moving in and out of his consciousness like extra shadows – _eight people in seven countries looking for courage._

Then, the seven of them walked through his world.  Now, he is walking through theirs.  He isn’t quite certain how it happens – only that one moment he is in Berlin, the next Mumbai, the next San Francisco Seoul Chicago Nairobi Mexico City Amsterdam.  

 _Are you alright?_ Kala asks him.

She has problems enough of her own, he doesn’t want to worry her with the gun in his pocket, the suspicions of Lila and inevitability – but his eyes meet hers, and he feels all of his worry, his fear, his desire for all of this to be over so that he can meet her someplace safe flow into her like a river running towards the sea.

 _Are you alright?_ Kala asks him.

And for just a moment – for the space between two heartbeats – he is.

This happens again six more times – seven interactions, seven parallel lines.  Seven people understanding him, if only for a moment.  It’s strange to hear Nomi and Riley pronouncing his name.  He hadn’t been quite sure before now that they knew it.

It’s funny how small the world seems, when he can walk through eight cities in as many minutes.  It’s funny how he can spend his entire life learning how to be alone, then suddenly be given seven strangers he would trust with his life.   _I’ll handle it,_ he told Will.  And, given a few more seconds, Will surely would have replied, _No.  We’ll handle it._  Wolfgang didn’t want to ask for help, only for company, but the two seem to go hand in hand with this crowd.

Wolfgang is going to a restaurant where a woman will try to kill him.  She is strong, and she is smart, but he is unafraid.

Seven extra shadows fan out behind him in the darkness.  They take three steps – three heartbeats – and step into Wolfgang.  Eight people in seven countries are looking for courage.

_There are things I will never understand about your world, just as there are things that you will never understand about mine._

Eight worlds are blurring at the edges – combining into one.

_We’ll handle it._

 

_Bring it, bitch._

_She smashes the wine on the table – Lila’s precious two-thousand-year-old grapes set ablaze in a declaration of war – and Wolfgang has never loved her more._

 

Wolfgang is tired of waiting for her.

He is usually a patient man – he will stand in line at the club for hours until he gets in, he will walk along the river until his fingers freeze, he will turn the dial of a safe until the clicks change key just so.  And he has waited for her to work through her fears, her confusions – has sat just out of view as she makes charts and tables and pro-con lists – has held himself back from listening as she asked the rest of the cluster for advice and gotten one answer, six different phrasings.

He has been hiding.  Hiding from Lila and hiding from her.  And he is so _tired_ – he has been feeling her deny this unspoken thing between them for so long that he worries he will suffocate, like a tree in the midst of a drought.

_“Why can’t she just leave him?” Wolfgang kicked a wall, imagining her husband, her family, her duty, her entire still-separate world._

_“She needs time,” Sun said – watching him quietly, smoking a cigarette._

_“She’s had time.  She needs courage.”_

_“Or maybe she needs a push,” Lito said, stepping into view.  He was out of the onesie, out of bed, and Wolfgang spared a moment to be proud of him before asking what he meant._

_“You know exactly what I mean.  You need to tell her.”_

He pulls her to his hiding spot.  (She is standing by the river, the sunset behind her a scattered mirage of oranges and reds.  He wishes for a moment that they could dive into the water – this would be so much easier, there.)

 _We need to talk,_ he says.  He remembers a hospital in Positano – a resolution to stop avoiding her.  Now, it’s his turn to pull her out of limbo.  He has practiced this conversation.  He even wrote down a few phrases on a bar napkin he found in his jacket pocket.  He’s giving her outs – opportunities to choose duty, to get rid of him – and he watches as she doesn’t take them.

 _I don’t know how to fix it,_ she says.  And he looks at her – he tries to tell her that she will never _know_ how to fix it because this – this thing between them – is not about _knowing._  It’s not about thinking, not about logic and rules but about connections and feelings.  Not about the mechanistic process of combustion but about the fire created.  Not about the wind patterns determining monsoon season but about the ensuing flood.

Here is how she fixes it: stop thinking.  Be selfish.  Do what will make her happy.

_If I were no longer able to feel what I feel… my life would no longer feel worth living._

She kisses him, and he is diving again – diving into the ocean, into a monsoon, into a flood.  They’re standing on the edge of a ship going a hundred kilometers an hour, about to hold hands and jump.  Her charts and tables and pro-con lists sink to the bottom of the ocean, to be nibbled to shreds by curious fish.

_I will come to Bombay._

_I will go to Berlin._

The truth is, her decision was made the moment he appeared on her balcony, looking out at the river.

 

_What matters to me is this.  Us.  Right now.  And I know you feel the same._

_I do._

 

After she decides, once and for all – after she tosses her notebooks into the river – after she sees the others grinning with pride in the back of her mind – after she lets him hoist her into the air and bend her backwards on her bed – she sits on her couch and waits for Rajan to come home.

Minutes pass, then hours, until it is far past the time his flight home from Bangalore was scheduled to arrive.  He sends one text, around nine o’clock, that he has been kept by further meetings and will return the next morning.  Kala considers calling him, telling him to come home right now – something tells her she will have less courage tomorrow than she does tonight – but she decides not to push him.  (She’s waited for months, she can wait one more night.)

She turns on the TV, flicks past dramas and news stations and commercials, then shuts it off again.  Makes herself a late dinner, eats too quickly, and finds herself once again on the couch, mind spinning with something like gravity.

There is something so improbable about all of this, something that still tugs at her even now that she has resolved to stop thinking.  Kala does the math in her head: there are seven and a half billion people in the world.  Of those seven and a half billion, fifty million are her age.  Of those fifty million, maybe one hundred thousand share her birthday.  That’s… she closes her eyes, pictures the numbers, lets them settle, lined up in clean lines on an imaginary chalkboard, then slide into place with soft _clicks._  (It sounds a little bit like cracking an S &D safe.)

That’s roughly one hundredth of a percent of all of the people in the world.

And in that number, somehow – by some twist of fate or some cosmic joke a deity has set up for their friends’ entertainment – one of the eight people to whom she has become connected is the one person who can pull her in and understand her completely like no other.

Kala remembers a theory she read once, at university.  Some Greek philosopher – maybe it was Plato, or was it Aristotle – posited that people were originally designed in pairs, then split apart, and now all souls wander the earth searching for their lost halves.  This myth, Kala thinks, was the origin for the concept of soulmates.

When she read that theory, she thought it ridiculous.  How could two souls be so intrinsically tied to one another that they need one another to survive?  A person _should_ be singular, should be independent and capable, not a lost half constantly searching for a whole.  If she were constantly searching for her other half, Kala remembers thinking, she never would pass any of her chemistry exams.

Now, looking back on it, Kala starts to wonder.  Could a man in Germany with a surprisingly kind smile and a fondness for rocket launchers be her lost other half?  Is this why they were connected, why their sensate bond formed?

It all seems so improbable.  Why would some god, or fate, or the conceptual machinations of the universe, want to bring her towards a man who is pulling her away from a comfortable life, and from her family?  What does the universe have to gain from Kala and Wolfgang falling in –

Kala jumps to her feet and runs to the living room’s exit.  She slides the glass door open on well-greased tracks – and the city is spread out before her: one thousand quietly burning lights like candles in a dark temple.  She wonders if this is how the gods seethe world – just a sea of lights, some maybe a little taller or brighter than others but mostly, overwhelmingly, the same.

“You haven’t talked to him yet.”

Kala turns, and – of course he’s here, standing beside her on the balcony.  She was thinking of him, he was thinking of her.  Action and reaction.

Wolfgang is dressed the same as always – dark jacket, dark pants, scuffed old boots – but something about him seems more tired than usual, more worn.  Perhaps it is the dark circles under his eyes, the pale shade of his cheeks, the undeniable fact that he needs a haircut.  His eyes are as bright as ever, though.  Clear as a cloudless sky.  Magnetic as one of the Earth’s poles.

“Where are you?” she asks him.

And suddenly, she is there – an outside table of a bar, a half-finished beer sitting in front of him.  The bar is empty – not a place he’d usually frequent, but then, he is hiding.

“Couldn’t sleep?” she asks.

He nods.  “I wanted to be here, when you talked to him.  But that’s not happening tonight.”

Kala reaches out to grab the beer and, out of a strange combination of curiosity and instinct, draws it to her mouth.  The taste is flat, strangely bland, like bread without any sauce or spices.  Kala wonders why he likes it so much, but then she feels how the memory of beer is tied to memories of laughing, of Felix, of his city, and it makes more sense.

“What are you thinking about?” he asks her.

“What does the universe gain from us falling – being attracted to each other?” she asks.

She turns her head to avoid his reaction at her near-slip of the tongue, but his sudden spark of affection rings out in her chest all the same. _Two echoes of the same pealing bell._

“I don’t know,” he answers honestly.  Takes a drink of his beer, then adds, “Shouldn’t your god have an answer to that?”

Kala considers that question, runs a hand through her hair, twisting it into a loose approximation of a braid as she speaks.  “I think my god would want me to be a good member of my family, loyal and kind and honest.  So that would mean we were drawn together as a warning for me, or as a challenge – suggesting I am not truly worthy of Rajan until I break from attraction to you.”

Wolfgang snorts quietly, not convinced.

“Or maybe… maybe it’s the other way around.  Maybe Ganesha knew I would be a kinder and more loyal person with you from the beginning, maybe we were always supposed to meet but were prevented by some unknown disaster, and now I need to break my bond with Rajan, put all my trust in my desires, and go to you.”

Wolfgang smiles, at that theory – but she still feels his incredulousness.   _Gods don’t give a shit about us._

“Or maybe,” Kala goes on, “maybe the reason is something else altogether.  Not pushing me towards what I _should_ do but towards what I _want_ to do.  The past year of my life felt like one long obligation, which I hate.  I hate feeling obligated and tied down, and objectified by people who claim to love me.  Do you know that Rajan has never once asked me how I reconcile my love of science with my faith?  Not once.  But you asked me that the second time we spoke to each other.”

Kala stops.  Takes a breath.  He is watching her carefully – and she might be imagining it, but she thinks his eyes have gotten more blue since she started talking.

“It’s like… thermodynamics,” she says.  “Any reaction, no matter what, will lead to an increase in the entropy of the system it inhabits.  And the universe is just one big system.  No matter what you do, no matter what choices you make, the universe will just get more chaotic.  Everything tends towards chaos – worrying about obligation and fate and the will of the gods is pointless.  Even if we try to change, become better people, the entropy  of the universe will still increase.  So I may as well make the choices that will get _me_ what I want, and fuck the consequences – because what’s one failed marriage in the grand scheme of the universe?"

“Are you… losing your faith?” he asks.

Kala shakes her head.   _Gods don’t give a shit about us,_ he said.  He was wrong, but he was also right.  “I’m not losing it.  I’m transforming it.  I’m deciding not to worry about _why_ the gods or the universe placed us together, and instead worry about what I’m going to _do_ about it.”

“And what are you going to do about it?” he echoes.  She sees the beginnings of a grin in his eyes.

_“This.”_

She kisses him, and it’s like diving into a thunderstorm – letting the wind and the water and the rain take her where chance dictates.  She moves within it, feels her worries and her fears sink away until all she can think about is how to pull him closer.

_It is never just rain, with them.  It is never just a drizzle, or a mist, or a sprinkling of the flowers._

_It is always a downpour._

She kisses him – like a promise, like a flooding of the world.

“I like this entropy thing,” he says, pressing their foreheads together, grinning – and, gods, she can feel his happiness.

“Yeah,” she says.  “Me too.”

 

_If I told you the whole truth – if I told you that you’re the last thought I have before I sleep – if I told you that you’re the first thought I have when I wake – if I told you how much I love you, would it have done any good?_

_Yes.  Because it would help me admit how much I love you._

 

_He loves her._

It is strangely easy for him to tell her.  Or perhaps not so strangely – the words have been held captive on his tongue for months, waves just waiting to break.  One request is enough to send his feelings spilling over, a tiny stream turned by monsoons into a running river.  He has never said these words to anyone, and part of him is terrified – part of him is leaping from a cliff into no man’s land – but she catches him.  He knew she would catch him.

_She loves him._

He phrases the words so carefully – all conditionals, _if I told you_ and _would it have_.  It’s an if-then statement, a hypothesis he is desperate to prove true.  She can feel his fear as he looks at her – he has never said these words to anyone – and his wave of emotion as she catches him.  These words have been held captive on the tip of her tongue for months, and now that she’s voiced them, it is strangely difficult to remember why she was holding back.

_He loves her._

The other shoe drops, and the most painful thing is that he is surprised.  For a moment, he is back in the key shop, watching Felix shoot back like an inside-out comet, unable to shield him from the shrapnel – only now he is the one set ablaze and Kala is the one watching helpless.   _You will regret not dying tonight,_ Lila said, and he underestimated her – he grew careless – he thought he could have _this._ _(Funny, how his entire world can shift on its axis in the space of a few seconds.)_  With his last burst of strength, he pushes Kala away just before Whispers shows up.

_She loves him._

Kala crashes into six worlds.  Sounds the alarm in her quaking heels and her smudged lipstick, grabs hands and eyes and minds until her cluster is together.  She has no time for carefully weighing options, no time for lists and charts, no time for hypotheses and conclusions.  Her world narrows, focuses in on a single target: she must save him.

_He loves her._

The torture is expected.  The degree of pain is unexpected.  Wolfgang remembers how Riley had felt, stripped to a bed and forced to relive her trauma – remembers how Nomi had felt, threatened with removal of the mind she’d always relied on to save her – remembers how will had felt, trapped in a haze unable to protect his family.  Wolfgang has always been the one they’d summon to take punches.   _Fighting is what I do._  

He remembers it all, but nothing has been like this – shockwaves forced through his body like artificial lightning – blood pouring from his mouth – losing control of his limbs his voice his mind.  He tries to shut the door, tries to close an iron wall around his cluster – tries to _protect them_ – but the wall is torn to pieces before he can even lay one stone.

_She loves him._

She is gasping on the floor of an airport in Mumbai, and she is standing by the side of a bed somewhere outside London.  She looks past the restraints on his arms and the blood on his face and stares straight into his eyes, sky blue and full of fear.   _You need to leave – he’s going to find you._  She grits her teeth and meets his gaze – meets his fear with determination – a monsoon meeting the sea.   _I don’t care if he finds me.  We’re coming for you._

_He loves her._

It would be easy – not too easy, but just easy enough – to pull free from his restraints, once the first trial is over and Whispers has slinked back into the shadows.  It would be easy to grab something sharp from the side table, to shove it through his heart, to save them.  (He’s been dragging them down since the beginning, with his violence and his vengeance.  Maybe they’d be stronger without him.)  But then, he remembers the look in her eyes when she drew him close – _without you this life is not worth living –_ and he catches a glimpse of her boarding her plane, dried tears on her cheeks and a case full of blockers clutched in her hands – and he closes his eyes, tries to resign himself to the pain.  If he killed himself here, she would never forgive him.

(Funny, how after years of him and Felix against the world, he’s found another person to live for.)

_She loves him._

It is impossible for her to sleep on the plane.  She cannot stop seeing him – bolted to a table, breathing shakily, trying so hard to shut out the pain.  They were so close to Paris, to each other, to a vision so selfish and so kinetic – their worlds were melting together.  But before they could reach that dream, it was torn away.  And so why this?  Why now?

Kala of a year ago would call this a divine punishment for betraying her husband, but Kala of now calls this a challenge – a test of her courage, her strength, her love.  After months of confusion, she at last has a singular purpose.

_He loves her._

He spares a moment, when Whispers appears again, to think that if he dies here, on this table, at least she knows the truth.  At least she’s leaving her husband.  At least she’s giving herself a chance at happiness.

_She loves him._

She catches his thought.  It echoes between them like a pealing bell – and then she whispers, _I have no chance at happiness without you._

_He loves her._

Eight people in seven countries have found their courage.

_She loves him._

 

_We’re coming for you._

 

It is raining in Bombay.

He hears the lightning, the thunder, pounding on the pavement like a heart torn to shreds and pieced together anew.  He has never been here before, but he recognizes it immediately as _her city_ , _her father’s restaurant_ – recognizes the faded white of the brick archway, the scent of poppadom wafting out from the kitchen, the kind-faced man that reassures her _it’s going to be a beautiful day._

And suddenly he recognizes the lightning, the thunder – w _e are born into this world the same way we shall leave it –_ he has stepped into her memories just before their connection solidified, and he wants to grab her arms, pull her back, scream at her that she needs to stay away – she would be saved so much pain if he protected her now – _she needs to take an umbrella._

But of course, she doesn’t need to take an umbrella.  She never has.

 

_Are there any outdoor swimming pools in Paris?_

_If we can’t find one, we’ll build one._


	4. coda: inexpressibility topos

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **inexpressibility topos:** a rhetorical device which refers to a speaker's inability to find or use the appropriate words to describe a situation or relate an experience.
> 
> so how about that finale, huh?

 

_Since you can, in fact, be in more than two places at the same time, defying several laws of physics, I would suggest that… there are no rules._

Kala sits on the rooftop.

The city stretches out beneath her, a sea of lights blinking faintly off and on.  The sky stretches out above her, stars winking and whispering their own kind of poetry.  She wonders if the stars know how to dance – if they can spin and grow close like a crowd of bodies on the dance floor, like a cluster of eight learning to celebrate love.

It’s chilly, up here.  There’s a breeze wafting across the roofs of the buildings, setting aflutter a flag that someone has mounted on the side of an air vent.  Kala can’t quite see the colors in the darkness, but she thinks it might be a rainbow.

She listens to the sounds of the city, caught in the strange hours between twilight and dawn.  A siren cries out.  A cat meows as it ascends to the top of a fire escape.  A bottle drops and shatters in a spray of glass.  A door opens, knocking against the tiled floor with a soft _thud._

Kala turns – that last noise was closer than the others – and sees a shadow moving towards her, soft and hazy around the edges, barefoot in a T-shirt and old pair of sweatpants.

“I thought you might be up here,” Wolfgang says.

Kala shifts over on the cement outcropping, makes room for him to slide into place beside her.  He drapes his arm around her shoulders as though it is second nature – as though it is something short of a miracle.  She leans into the touch, pillows her head on his shoulder, smiles as he tightens his fingers in the thin cotton of her nightshirt.

_She is back for a moment in the garden of a villa, an hour’s drive outside this shining city – she is stepping out of a car, stepping out of Rajan’s arms, and into sunlight clear as a pool of rainwater – she is every nerve ending in his skin and every molecule of oxygen in his arteries – she is every drop of salt pulled down his cheeks – she is the gravity anchoring him to the earth –_

_She is expanding around him, worlds collapsing and building back in the moment it takes for his hands to meet hers._

She feels this now, too, as he turns his head into her hair, buries his nose against her cheek.  She knows he too is remembering the villa and the sunlight, knows he is wondering how he can be so lucky as to have her beside him.  She understands that how he cares for her is something like _love_ but more tangible – something like stones sinking to the bottom of the ocean, marking the space where mountain ranges will slowly grow up from sand.

_I know what love is because of you._

Kala turns in her seat, lifts one hand to Wolfgang’s cheek and moves to kiss him.

The scientist in her wants to take notes on this – wants to catalogue every sensation in diagrams and scatter plots and EKG charts – but the more she touches him like this, tangible and _together_ in a way that gives the word as many new definitions as there are ripples outward from the drop of a stone – the more she falls into the feeling, creation and destruction and new worlds spinning up from the place where their lips meet.

He is, she is, they are.  It is impossible to document any further.

Wolfgang is grinning at her when they pull away.  His hair is tousled, sticking up in a point just parallel with his right eye, and it takes her a moment to realize her hands were the direct cause.  He shifts his arm back to its place around her shoulders, warm and solid.  She leans into the touch.  She might be imagining it, but she thinks the sky is brighter now – a shade of blue further from twilight and closer to the bright wonder of his eyes.

“Nice view,” Wolfgang says.

“Are you talking about me or Paris?” Kala asks.

He laughs, doesn’t need to say what she already understands: he’s talking about both.  The Eiffel Tower glimmers faintly in the distance, a herald of the morning.

Wolfgang unearths a bottle from beneath his left foot – he must’ve brought it up with him, although Kala didn’t notice until now – and twists off the top with a practiced flick of his wrist.  He offers Kala a drink, and she recognizes his favorite beer from Berlin.

“How did you find that here?” she wonders.

He shrugs and tips the bottle back.  Kala watches the movement of his throat – distracted – and has almost forgotten her question by the time he answers.  “Your husband is a powerful man.”

There used to be an edge to that phrase, _your husband._   Harsher consonants, deeper vowels.  But now Wolfgang says it as though echoing _your family,_ or _your faith._

“I know what you’re going to ask me,” Kala tells him.

Wolfgang looks down at her, his eyes glittering faintly in the fading starlight.  “What am I going to ask you?”

“You’re going to ask me to choose.”

There is a beat – he takes another sip of the beer – and then he shakes his head.  “No.”

Kala almost falls backwards off the outcropping.  But he holds her steady, keeps her grounded, waits for her gears to begin to turn.  Literature review, hypothesis, methods…

“Then you’re going to ask me about the future,” she says.  “How I plan on navigating this… this…”  She waves her hand in the air, hoping to communicate _I love you more than I love my own life and I told you I would leave my husband but my husband has also proven himself beyond my furthest reaching hypotheses and I think I might love him as well and also it seems like you and he get along incredibly well and we all just participated in a psychic orgy with the rest of the cluster that was the high point of my sexual existence._

Wolfgang gets it.  Of course he does.

He takes another drink, swallows slowly, and then begins to speak.  There is a different quality to his words here, on this rooftop, his body actually beside hers.  As though his speech is the keys of a piano, and someone has just discovered the damper pedal.

“Look, Kala,” he says.  “In the past few weeks, I almost lost you so many times – in the BPO lab, during the exchange, in Naples.  I almost lost myself.  I watched you bleed out on that carpet –”

 _and she is there, she is pouring out, she is the last whisper of breath across his lips, she is an inside-out comet, she is standing on unsteady legs and yelling at him to stop weeping and_ do something –

Wolfgang shudders, and draws her closer.  Pulls her out of the memory as he pulls himself back here.

“I couldn’t think about where you’d live, or what you’d do, or who you’d kiss, after that,” he goes on.  “As long as you’re alive, and as long as you’re happy, that’s all I can ask for.  I don’t give a shit about the details.”

“Oh,” she says.

He smiles at her – and she remembers a glittering bedroom, limbs sprawled across soft linen sheets, an invitation for her and her _husband_ , waves of pleasure rolling and breaking like the ocean in the midst of a storm.

“Do what makes you happy,” he repeats.  “Everything else comes after that.”

She grabs his beer – the glass is cold and faintly wet in her fingers, and the liquid burns in her throat like an echo of fireworks.  It takes her a moment to swallow, enough time to formulate an answer:

“But what would make _you_ happy?”

He hasn’t thought about this.  She can tell, by the way his eyes dilate – focusing on her, then far away, then back to her.

“My old shop, with Felix,” he says slowly.  “Dancing with you.  A pool where we can swim.  The rest of our cluster safe.  Rajan…”

“Rajan?” Kala asks, when he trails off.

Wolfgang shrugs.  “He’s not bad, when he’s not trying to control everything around him.”

Kala knows there is more to it than this – steps into Wolfgang’s memories and watches grudging respect grow to slow appreciation for this man who will drop his life for a group of strangers, who will admit his mistakes and step back, who will watch his wife shoot a gun and say _teach me._   But she has drawn enough mechanisms to know that not all reactions happen immediately – some need a catalyst, some take multiple stages, and there is always an activation threshold – and so she does not pry further.  She instead relaxes in his arms, closes her eyes, and steps into a memory of her own.

 

_“A job?” she asked._

_Dr. Al-Sadaawi nodded.  “The blockers you developed in these past couple of weeks have proven that you’re smart, you’re knowledgeable, and you can think on your feet.  You have an innate intuition into piecing together sensate biology.  You would be a perfect addition to our team.”_

_Kala starts to speak, but Dr. Al-Sadaawi holds up a hand.  “I should add,” she says, “that although we would certainly like to expand operations into India, you would have to relocate to Paris for this position, at least for several months.  Think about this, Mrs. Rasal.  Take your time.  Consider what you want.”_

 

_Do you know what you want?_

First: she wanted to stay.  Second: she wanted to leave.  Now: she wants both.  She wants Wolfgang and she wants Rajan, she wants a pool to swim in and a roof to sit upon and a floor upon which to dance.  She wants an apartment to call her own, to fill with flowers and statues of Ganesha and pictures of her family.  She wants the world spread out at her feet, resources enough that she can keep asking questions and designing experiments that will improve the lives of everyone she loves.  She wants the warm feeling that rises in her chest when she sits surrounded by her cluster, when she can feel the connections between their minds humming like so many vibrations twined together into a single melody.

This is a world of impossible connection, of psychic networks that spin across the world like the root network of an enormous forest.  This is a world in which Kala can be in more than two places at once.

 _I can feel my sense of self expanding,_ Hernando said, in the kitchen of a Paris apartment.

 _I like this entropy thing,_ Wolfgang said, on a rooftop in Bombay not unlike this one.

 _Things change, people change, but with you, that doesn’t scare me,_ Nomi said on the bridge of the Eiffel Tower.

Kala could make a thousand pro/con lists and draw a thousand diagrams, but they would all lead her to this same conclusion.  The universe tends towards chaos, the human mind tends towards connection, and she can have everything she wants if she only learns how to ask for it.

 

A now-familiar _thud_ pulls Kala back to the rooftop.  The door opens and Rajan climbs out, his slippers sliding on the cracked tiles.

“Hey,” Wolfgang says, waving him over.

Kala moves on her makeshift bench again.  It’s barely long enough for two people, let alone three, but they make it work: Rajan presses against her right side, Wolfgang presses against her left, their arms layer around each other like the spices in her father’s best kadhi.  There is a cool breeze up on this rooftop and her legs are bare, but Kala has never felt so warm.

“Nice view,” Rajan says.

Wolfgang grins, and offers him the last of the beer.

Kala waits until her husband swallows, watches the movement of his throat.  She remembers stepping into their Positano bedroom ready to prove herself – remembers shaking on a couch in Mumbai waiting for him to return and face her rejection – remembers his expression when she woke on a floor in Naples, blood pooling on her chest.  He would cross oceans for her, she knows.  Perhaps one day, she will do the same for him.

She breaks the cocoon of Rajan’s and Wolfgang’s arms to stand up.  The tiles are smooth under her bare feet, and the lights of the city wink softly beneath her, as though encouraging her to go on.

“I’m going to take a new job,” Kala tells them.  “With the reinstated BPO, under Dr. Al-Sadaawi.  It will mean relocating to Paris, at least for a few months.”

Rajan considers her for a moment – she watches his eyes flicker through confusion, annoyance, settle on pride.  “Okay.”  He nods.  “That’s a good idea, actually.  Remove yourself from the corruption investigation, while I get everything settled.”

“Rajan.”  Kala’s voice is quiet, smooth around the edges, but she knows he will recognize an undertone of scolding.

“Kala?”

“I’m not doing this to make things easier for you.  I’m doing this for myself.”

On her other side, Wolfgang stifles a snort.

“Sorry, I’m still learning,” Rajan says.  “Learning how to exist in this world that is so much wider than I thought.  And learning to be more who you need me to be.”

“Oh, you know, being who she needs, that's simple,” Wolfgang says.  “You just –”  And he contorts his fingers in an elaborate series of gestures that somehow perfectly mirror a scene from the bedroom downstairs, a few hours before.  Kala feels her face go red.

But he’s smiling – and not his _come here_ smile either, but his soft smile, his surprised smile, the smile he wore in a Berlin snowfall when he realized he loved her.

“Kala, this… will make you happy?” Rajan asks.

Kala nods.  She is bare feet planted on smooth ground, and she is the sun just beginning to rise over the rooftops of Paris, and she is the rest of her cluster sleeping downstairs, solid and safe and warm.

“It will,” she says.

“Then…” Wolfgang looks at Rajan, Rajan looks back at Wolfgang.  They nod together, two variations on the same melody.

“Then we will make it work.”

Kala takes her place between them – the concrete outcropping isn’t wide, but it is enough space for her to sit half on Wolfgang’s lap and half on Rajan’s, and it is enough space for her to spread her arms across both their shoulders, and it is enough space for her to bridge their warmth.  It is all the space in the world, and it is no space at all.

As the sun rises, dark blue fading to purple and purple melting into red orange gold, it begins to rain.

**Author's Note:**

> talk to me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/owlinaminor) & [tumblr](http://owlinaminor.tumblr.com/).


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